Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child- the $100 Laptop project & Internet Governance
Today, Nicholas Negroponte (brother of our very own DNI, and famous for a very long time as the head of the renown MIT Media Lab) announced the hand-crank powered $100 laptop at the World Summit on Information Society in Tunisia as part of his "One Laptop Per Child" effort to give cheap laptop computers to kids in the 3rd world. Oh yeah, it's got mesh wifi (for local voip potential), loonix os, 500MHz AMD, 1GB flash mem, and get this: development tools like make and a C compiler. Yeah, that's right, 3rd world flashmob developers: watch out India! Wired
"This is truly a moving experience," said UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, who showed up at the beginning of the event. "It's also a moving expression of global solidarity and corporate citizenship." - ZDnet
I love Kofi, but that's just the most vague diplomatic back-pattery I've ever read. How about a "That's way cool, what a crazy idea!" or "WiFi? No ***? How many can I pre-order?," Kofi? Google, Rupert Murdoch, Apple and Microsoft have all expressed interest or are contributing to Negroponte's not-for-profit. (What, no Bono?) BBC Anyone else find it ironic that the pr picture has a white kid's hands, when the deployment'll be going to mostly browntowner kids (those that are trapped, peering out)?
Sad, but $100's like 1/10th of a family's income in Africa. I wonder how soon we'll see Nigerian scammers putting these things up on eBay? Still, I think this is not only a cool technical and organizational experiment, but it's an attempt at doing something good.
My favorite thing about the whole Internet stuff in Tunisia is that they're almost as fascistly restrictful of access to the outside Internet as China. Human Rights Watch published a report "False Freedom: Online Censorship in the Middle East and North Africa" which cites Tunisia as a country which details its citizens for Internet use (a journalist comparing Tunisia's president to Ariel Sharon is serving 3 years in jail on charges of "insulting the judiciary") and blocks websites that talk about Tunisa's human rights abuses. ('That kid was downloading lawyer jokes on his lime green laptop, 15 years in jail!') Good call, UN.
Also, just before the start of the same conference, the UN wasn't able to wrest control of ICANN away from the United States and turn it into a bureaucratic quagmire of rotating boards headed up by Robert Mugabe, as proposed in the UN's Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG). Mugabe, the dictator of Zimbabwe, had the balls to call the existing system of Internet governance a form of neocolonialism. Foreign Policy, 11/2005. I can just imagine the new tld's that'd be created: .mugaberules .ushaters, kofi.kofi.woot.woot.woot (that last one's a newsgroup, not a tld, sorry)
If you're interested in the sweet UN-style resolution that was adopted that basically said "darn, we lost, but we're going to make a non-relevant advisory board anyway," see here.