14 DAY TRIAL // OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) is an interesting campaign funded by Nicholas Negroponte that is meant to bring one inexpensive laptop to every child from every corner of the world. But when the laptops are used with a different purpose than educational matters, there is a problem. Reuters reports that Nigerian pupils are using the donated laptops to view pornographic movies and other adult material found on the Internet. The laptop computers are manufactured by Quanta Computers and are coming with an AMD Geode CPU, 256 MB DRAM, a 1GB flash memory and a built-in video camera.
"Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials," News Agency of Nigeria said according to Reuters. "A representative of the One Laptop Per Child aid group was quoted as saying that the computers, part of a pilot scheme, would now be fitted with filters," the same publication added.
The pornographic content has always been a major problem for all of us because the adult material is continuously assaulting our computers through several distribution methods. First of all, the porn stuff is delivered to us by email, using unsolicited messages, also known as spam. At this time, there are no efficient ways to block the entire amount of unwanted emails so it's quite difficult to block all the incoming messages. Then, the users are assaulted by pop-up windows that are appearing every time a visitor connects to some websites.
At this time, we can't say the software market owns a powerful solution able to block this huge amount of adult material so, if we really want to protect the pupils using the laptops, some filters need to be designed soon. However, even if the laptops are including powerful filters to block the pornographic content, it is very difficult to block all of them since every day brings approximately 275 new porn websites every day, according to a recent study.