Security For All

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization, creators and purveyors of those cute green and white XO laptops, have announced another Give One, Get One (G1G1) program for 2008. In case you are unfamiliar with last year’s G1G1 program, its a deal where buyers pay for two XO laptops, get one machine for themselves and the other is donated to a school child in a developing nation. This year the program will run from November 17 until December 31, and the details will be similar to those from last year’s program:

$199 to give a laptop to a child in the developing world.

and/or

$399 to give a laptop to a child in the developing world and get a laptop.

In addition it was announced that OLPC G1G1 2008 will be run through Amazon, which will not only solve some of the delivery issues that G1G1 2007 had, but will also make G1G1 2008 open to Europe.

When it goes on sale the XO laptop is expected to cost £268 (313 euros) and should be available in 27 EU nations as well as Switzerland, Russia and Turkey.

The Give One, Get One programme was first run in the US in November and December 2007. The OLPC organisation claims it sold almost 190,000 machines via the scheme.

Despite the success of the scheme, it drew criticism because the OLPC group had trouble delivering machines to those who had ordered one. In a bid to resolve these issues, it signed up with Amazon in September 2008.

The OLPC News site has this handy FAQ snippet about European G1G1 2008.

1. When will G1G1 v2 be available in Europe? Monday, November 17, just like in the United States.
2. At what price?Around $399 | £254 | €312 (No VAT will be applied only shipping costs!).
3. Which countries will be included? The 27 member states of the EU, plus Switzerland, Russia and Turkey.
4. Will we get customized keyboards? No, there will only be English/International keyboards.
5. Which power-plugs will be available? European and UK.
6. How will I be able to order or donate? Also via Amazon’s online-store at amazon.com/xo from where you will be redirected to amazon.co.uk.

Aside from the excellent opportunity to contribute to a worthy cause, these are killer little devices. From the OLPC wiki:

The laptop is not a cost-reduced version of today’s laptop; we have fundamentally reconsidered personal computer architecture—hardware, software, and display. Unlike any laptop ever built, the laptop:

• Creates its own mesh network out of the box. Each machine is a full-time wireless router. Children—as well as their teachers and families—in the remotest regions of the globe will be connected both to one another and to the Internet.

• Features a 7.5-inch, 1200×900-pixel, TFT screen and self-refreshing display with higher resolution (200 DPI) than 95% of the laptops on the market today. Two display modes are available: a transmissive, full-color mode; and a reflective, high-resolution mode that is sunlight readable. Both of these modes consume very little power: the transmissive mode consumes one watt—about one seventh of the average LCD power consumption in a laptop; and the reflective mode consumes a miserly 0.2 watts.

• Can selectively suspend operation of its CPU, which makes possible further remarkable power savings. The laptop nominally consumes less than two watts—less than one tenth of what a standard laptop consumes—so little that laptop can be recharged by human power. This is a critical advance for the half-billion children who have no access to electricity.

Since last year some significant enhancements (“enhancements” in this context means “truly epic hacks”) have moved the XO well beyond a child’s edutainment toy. For example there are alternate user interfaces for adults to replace the Sugar interface that runs over the Fedora OS.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of many, we have a whole range of options for these newest XO laptop owners:

• Xfce
• LDXE
• Ubuntu
• Fedora Live

And yes, there is also the Windows XO option for those special kids in Peru, but until a pirate hack appears that’s not an option for G1G1′ers.

Note: In case you really want to see that “pirate hack”, I know this guy…

You can use an XO as a DVD player – a manually or solar rechargable DVD player! Or use it as a rather large mobile phone via Skype. Or an inexpensive e-book reader with thousands of free e-books – take that Kindle! The XO is eminently hackable with almost all of the user apps and glue written in Python and readily available for the tweaking enjoyment of the user! In other words a truly educational device.

So if you know someone who could benefit from this great technology – like your kids, or your parents, or a budding hacker, or yourself – or if you would just like to support the OLPC effort, now is your golden opportunity. Do it and you can join my mesh net.