[Server-devel] antitheft

[Yannick Warnier]

Le samedi 25 août 2012 à 12:41 -0500, Sameer Verma a écrit :
> Hello!
> 
> I'm looking to get a sense of how widely antitheft is being used and
> to what level of success. There was a post recently where Bruce Baikie
> came across 500 XO-1s in Ethiopia, that were locked, but the server
> was dead/gone/missing/ so these were unusable. On the other hand, when
> XOs are not set up for antitheft, there is attrition (we have some in
> one of our Jamaica projects, although its fairly low).
> 
> 1) Does antitheft work as advertised?
> 2) What are comfortable parameters for it to work? How many hours
> should the lease be?

Hi Sameer,

Not sure if Sebastian Silva is on this list, but from a conversation
with him not so long ago, it appeared as if the antitheft mechanism was
the main reason why Peru was now in a blocked situation where most XO's
have completely outdated software: it makes it too difficult to update
for local communities, and in practice there has be no account of any
theft reported to the server since the beginning of the national
distribution (of now around 850,000 laptops).

As far as I understood, it has served no purpose whatsoever at the
national level. It doesn't mean in any way that it is bad, but at least
locally, the project would have been better without it.

Hope it helps,

Yannick