Linux Basement Presents: Chad’s Blog

This picture says it all…

At some point, something went very wrong. The vision of the One Laptop Per Child project went well beyond giving consumers a “usable XP laptop”. Instead, by fostering the concept of giving third world countries’ children a free and open source platform to learn and work on, we are setting a low barrier to entry for them for the rest of their lives, to use and develop these open technologies.

From an article on CNN Money.

“Microsoft’s Utzschneider says government technology ministers and other leaders have long been attracted to the XO’s innovative design, but were also partisans of Windows. They worried, he says, that support would be a problem, and also wanted students to use software they would also be using later in life. These are clearly reasonable concerns.”

This statement by Microsoft is case and point. The fact that they believe that a proprietary system is more supportable by people in a third world country is absurd. Opening source code to your operating system allows anyone who is willing to know the inner workings of a system. What exactly is the support structure for a nearly obsolete operating system (XP) on the OLPC? It is a laughable notion that a child in Chile who’s family  makes 50 dollars a year is going to get any support from Microsoft when his XP OLPC blue screens. By making the system free and open, a support structure can, and has been built around the communities that receive the OLPC.

Microsoft wants these students to use software they will be using later in life? Putting children that will be reaching the corporate world in 10 years on windows XP benefits no one. It does not benefit the child, and it certainly does not benefit the countries they live in. Putting them on a free and open system that embraces web technologies built into the operating system embraces the future of computing. It is more important that children learn the underlying foundations of technology, and not the superficial layer on top. That is to say, they should be learning how to word process, not how to use Microsoft word. They should be learning how to surf the web, not how to use Internet Explorer. The argument that the OLPC is “hard to use” comes from people who do not have vision, and do not allow change. You have to look at these technological tools from the perspective of a Child who does not have preconceptions of what a computer is, or what a computer should be.

Unfortunately I think that bad business decisions have put the One Laptop Per Child program in jeopardy of failure, and now they are grasping at anything to keep afloat. This latest move clearly undermines the foundations that the project was built on, and it saddens me to see such a brilliant project become part of the proprietary grind.

It is true that many Governments will not purchase computers unless they have a Microsoft label on the box. However, this is a fault of government agencies being tied into monopolistic bad decisions. Many governments are now seeing the folly of relying so heavily on an operating system. As Web services and cloud computing become ever more prevalent, this reliance on proprietary software as a fundamental norm will go away, and I am hopeful, for all of us, that in the future we will not see such a pure project become corrupt by Corporate Giants.

Several Quotes in this article credited to http://money.cnn.com/2008/05/15/technology/microsoft_olpc.fortune/

Here are a couple of pictures of me getting the Technology Leadership Award. It was a great honor, being that I was the only person to get it out of 25 divisions. I am still dizzy. This is Secretary Choprah and myself and me doing my acceptance speach. It was short, I got interestingly emotional.

I’m back home. The training last week was just awesome. I did get to do an interview with a friend of mine who administers the super computer at Virginia Tech. I will release the interview for LB episode 15.
The malware dissection on day 5 and 6 was quite enlightening. I not only learned about how malware works fundamentally, but also learned quite a bit about the inner workings of IRC and Bots, due to the fact that a lot of malware uses IRC to infect and control systems. Interesting. I also am inspired to set up a honey pot on the inside of my network just to see what I can come up with. I hope to do so next week.
I’m home now, work is chaos, and I have a sick kid. Hopefully things will settle down soon.

Tags: life, malware, training

Today was pretty awesome. We learned about malware, viruses and botnets. The teacher, was Johannas Ullrich, who is the father of the Internet Storm Center. He was a very animated teacher and did a very good time. The class was completely linux friendly, and actually I had an advantage to those running windows, as most of the tools we used could be easily installed using apt-get. Some notable programs I learned about today:
Netdude
iftop
honeywall
graphiz
LaBrea
Honeyd

I am friends with couple of guys that work IT here at Virginia Tech. I met them last year and they’ve been kind enough to lead me around for lunch and show me the ins and outs of the town. Today, I got to tour where one of them works, in the supercomputer center. 1100 G5s. It was pretty incredible. The are currently migrating from mac os, over to Yellow Dog Linux, mainly due to flexibility. Yellow Dog is the same operating system used on the PS3, noted for its tweaked configuration for powerPC architecture. It was an amazing feat to see so many computers working on crunching numbers. They utilize almost all of the processing power, and the sight of all those processor monitors glowing is something that will stay with me. It was a geeky dreamland.

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