[OLPC Security] Anti-theft and Anti-Sale ideas for Nepal

[Bryan Berry]

I finally finished reading the Bitfrost spec and I have to say I was quite
impressed.  It gave me a lots of ideas for how we could deal w/ what I call
the "hungry kid" and "alchoholic dad" problems.  These problems come up in
discussion all the time.

The Hungry Kid
There are a lot of malnourished kids in Nepal's countryside.  If we give
them XO's they will sell them immediately for food or as soon as food
becomes short.  However hungry kids w/ out schooling, provided they don't
starve, will grow up to be unskilled adults, perpetuating Nepal's cycle of
poverty.  Is this an intractable problem?  Perhaps not.

Alcoholic Dad
Alcoholism is a big problem in rural Nepal.  How can we keep Alcoholic Dads
from selling their kids' laptops?

I really like Bitfrost's P_THEFT protection option where the laptop could
"phone home" to renew its 21-day operating lease. W/out that operating
lease, the laptop will shutdown.  However, that is not ideal for Nepal, at
least for the next several years.  Consistent internet access in remote
districts will remain prohibitively expense for at least the next several
years.

Nepal could use a modified P_THEFT to discourage sales by hungry kids and
alcoholic Dads or general theft.  The number one use for sold laptops will
be Internet access and they would primarily end up in Nepal's larger cities
or abroad -->Bangkok's Panthip electronics market.

1) If Nepali child's laptop is stolen, they report it as stolen and an
oversight body adds the serial # to the online anti-theft registry.  When
someone does use the stolen laptop to connect to the Internet, the laptop
checks its own serial # against the online anti-theft registry.
Note: this is a only a slight modification to the P_THEFT protection

2) We could hard code a national identifier into the laptop's MAC address.
The laptop could periodically check it's national identifier against it's
Internet gateway.  If it is no longer in Nepal, say Bangkok or Delhi, it
disables itself.

3) Using Community Groups to discourage sales or theft of laptops.  This is
not a technical protection.  Perhaps community groups should be put in
charge of reporting stolen laptops instead of teachers.  There are too many
cases in rural Nepal where teachers hoard supplies, like solar-powered lamps
and wind-up radios, for themselves.  Teachers sometimes teach children of a
different caste than their own and this can lead to problems.

Thoughts?
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