[Server-devel] DanGuardian and XS Plans

[Stefan Reitz]

Hello List

Just from my (not too recent) experience with the Birmingham deployment:
There are two competing interests:
- As long as the Board of Education (BoE) receives federal funds under the No Child Left Behind Act they are responsible for providing internet only in a filtered manner (certified, lots of signatures and red tape ...). The Birmingham BoE is *very* broke so they rely on these funds. Effectively this means upstream filtering in the BoE's IT department's realm (this also helps them - gets abused for - demands for additional funding).
- To provide a cost effective solution (without lots of additional funding for overhead / BoE infrastructure) the XS could provide a filtering solution of its own and thus provide a daring principal with a way of providing parallel infrastructure just for XO/XS purposes.

This means as long as the BoE does not agree to a two tiered IT infrastructure (which they in my opinion can't), DansGuardian is not needed. Yet it might be helpfull in increasing acceptance for olpc products in a less messed up environment.

In previous discussions I understood that olpc did not want get in a place where it could be held responsible for content filtering (with no resources and mandate to manage the servers remotely a very understandable stand).  I do think though that olpc can only provide the tools currently available and should not worry too much about whether local admins put them to good use.
(And I personally favour Brasil's teachers union's stand to turn filtering off. Life filtered is not life. Encounter the problems, use them for contents of lessons, and get on with reality.)

just my 2cts (and keep up the great work!)
Stefan

Btw: I just relocated  from Alabama to Germany for job reasons and have no personal stakes in the Birmingham deployment (nor any other deployments for that matter).

> Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2008 20:06:25 +1300
> From: martin.langhoff at gmail.com
> To: wad at laptop.org
> CC: server-devel at lists.laptop.org; greg at laptop.org
> Subject: Re: [Server-devel] DanGuardian and XS Plans
> 
> On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 4:17 AM, John Watlington <wad at laptop.org> wrote:
> >    In existing deployments (not trials) content filtering
> > is being done upstream in the internet connection.
> 
> Interesting! I didn't know that -
> 
> > Content filtering is a very sensitive subject, and any
> > offering made by OLPC should make it VERY CLEAR
> > that the country is responsible for the filtering -- both
> > the initial setup and maintaining the filter.
> 
> Yup. And also very clear that we believe that filters are quite leaky
> -- meaning that they will have problems with it, and a plan / process
> to deal with it. Some local teams may find planning for such
> situations hard.
> 
> > Squid has been supported since build 161, long before
> > Martin started wholesale improvements.    Easier to install ?
> > Right now you have to type one command line:
> > /etc/sysconfig/olcp-scripts/TURN_SQUID_ON
> > to permanently enable Squid.   This was done simply
> > because not all installation will want it.
> 
> Yep - TURN_SQUID_ON works well on the current xs-0.5 dev version.
> However, I'm not very happy with it due to memory footprint, and
> considering replacing it with a apache + mod_cache_disk which - from
> what I've seen - plays to the strengths of linux's disk i/o handling.
> 
> cheers,
> 
> 
> 
> m
> -- 
>  martin.langhoff at gmail.com
>  martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
>  - ask interesting questions
>  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
>  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
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