Ethiopian Kids Hacked Their Donated Tablets In Just Five Months

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681011/ethiopian-kids-hacked-their-donated-tablets-in-just-five-months

by thingummywut • 14 years ago

69 21 14 years ago

Pr0• 14 years ago

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4724660

guylhem• 14 years ago

Considering the OLPC (as pictured) is a dedicated i386 hardware without touchscreen, and that OLPCs runs on a customized RedHat, while the article refers to hacking Android (?) and a Motorola Xoom tablet, I wonder what kind of huge mix up this is and what it is supposed to mean.

EDIT: thanks for the helpful explanation in the comment. I read the article twice and still couldn't figure that out. My first idea was the journalist mixed this up. My mistake

tankbot• 14 years ago

You could always just read the (admittedly not that great) piece which precisely explained all of that.

In a sentence:

Nicholas Negroponte, who started OLPC, dropped off a bunch of Xooms that run Android in a couple of villages where the kids figured out how to enable the tablet's camera without any instruction or even literacy.

randartie• 14 years ago

The indian child in the photo was also a giveaway since this is an article about Ethiopia.

spideyunlimited• 14 years ago

Why is the in-text photo that of an Indian girl with a hindi vowel?

ramayac• 14 years ago

... and Ghandi hanging in the back of the rural Indian school, he he.

prawks• 14 years ago

MIT is trying to crack the wicked problem of teaching literacy and other skills to 100 million or so first-grade-age kids in the developing world with no teachers or infrastructure.

I guess it's relevant.

runn1ng• 14 years ago

All poor people look the same.

jlmendezbonini3• 14 years ago

Oh boy, if you had said something like: "maybe the reason they didn't care about using the right picture is because there's this intrinsically wrong belief that poor people look the same".

Since you did not, let me tell you that it's very insulting and I hope it gets deleted soon.

joonix• 14 years ago

I don't understand... they don't have electricity, yet they have wifi? Where are they getting the apps?

prezjordan• 14 years ago

The internet connection is Ad-hoc IIRC, but of course one member still needs access to the internet.

dhughes• 14 years ago

They carry apps in buckets on their heads for miles.

jlmendezbonini3• 14 years ago

In rural areas of certain developing countries is common to have cell phones access and/or Internet while not having electricity in their house. I've seen towns that have a central building that has some electricity (wind or solar) and small satellite dishes for Internet. In other places I've seen cell phone towers and the telecom company provides charging stations for individuals that do not have electricity within their homes.

vacri• 14 years ago

Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch

Wow, found a blemish on an unusually featureless, smooth object and poked at it. Amazing.

As for 'hacking android', it's kinda scary that OLPC is so bereft of talent that their security can't stand up to illiterate first-graders. I mean, if we're going to go with 'hacking android' and not 're-enabling the camera'.

kylec• 14 years ago

Say what you will, it took me more than four minutes to find the power button on the Xoom.

lolnope• 14 years ago

I've seen this article five or so times now, but what's always missing is what they did that counts as "hacking" the tablet. Was it changing a (hidden) setting in the camera preferences file? Disabling some sort of monitoring software (and if so, how)? Reverse engineering a preexisting binary on the device?

sopooneo• 14 years ago

I am convinced that when computing comes in force to the third world, it will not be through donated/subsidized laptops, but through phones. I bet that in 100 years, the famous hacker that rose to great power from the slums will have cut his teeth on a mobile device that was purely the result of the free market. This is not a value judgement. Just a prediction.

JulianMorrison• 14 years ago

See, professor, the Martians are intelligent after all!

Oh wait, those were human beings, and they're being treated like lab rats because they're poor and not European. Seriously does nobody else see the stark white-man's-burden arrogance in all of this?.

Ethiopian Kids Hacked Their Donated Tablets In Just Five Months

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