[OLPC Security] Grey Markets: differentiation of legitimately purchased laptops

[Mike C. Fletcher]

Had a brief discussion with Ivan about this, but wanting to open out the 
discussion so that we get more feedback regarding whether this is a real 
security issue, or just an "idle threat" as it were...

Regarding the 2-for-1 program going live in November, we will be handing 
out laptops which are identical to the laptops being handed out to 
children in the developing world.

Originally (to my knowledge), the plan was that some corporate partner 
would be contracting with Quanta to produce a custom run of the laptops, 
with some physical differentiation, such as a change of colour, so that 
the two "products" (the educational and the purchased) would be visibly 
different, possession of one type would be a badge of honour (those who 
help support), while the other would be a badge of shame (those who have 
supported the grey market and theft of children's laptops).  That 
approach apparently was not feasible, so we wound up with a situation 
where our own program may be opening up a grey market.

As far as I know it's probably too late to change something as critical 
as overall colour (i.e. making the case colour red or blue or black or 
something like that instead of green), so I'm wondering if we have any 
ideas on how to differentiate the XO's which will be part of the 
give-one-get-one program.  Suggestions:

    * specify the x-o graphic colour (on the lid) that will be delivered
      to the US for give-one-get-one as a single distinctive colour
      which is *not* part of the normal colour set.  Suggestions might
      be all-white, gold-and-silver, or all-black. We should be AFAIK
      capable of such a specification (since we are specifying
      individual laptop colours for the laptops anyway).  That would
      make it easy to let people know "if it has an all-black xo, it's
      okay, that's one of the friends of the project", otherwise lynch
      them.  That's going to be reasonably integral to the case, so it
      makes grey-marketing difficult.
    * specify a special keyboard silk-screen that includes wording to
      the effect of "this is a give-one-get-one" or "thanks for
      donating".  Obviously mass grey-marketers could swap out the
      keyboard, but that need to order large numbers of keyboards should
      make it easy to track them.

Take care,
Mike

-- 
________________________________________________
  Mike C. Fletcher
  Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
  http://www.vrplumber.com
  http://blog.vrplumber.com