Earlier this month is was reported that the Birmingham, Alabama school district was going to be the first to offer the One Laptop per Child (http://laptop.org/) in America (http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/04/1525219). This story caught my attention because it hits close to home (I will leave it up to your imagination in which way.) The basic idea is that eighth-grade Birmingham students will get the laptops at the beginning of the year and then turn them in at the end. If the laptops, which look like some sort of fancy toy, are lost or stolen, they can be remotely disabled.

Now comes the interesting questions. What happens when the very innocent and well intentioned city council sees some of the darker sides to giving every eighth-grader a laptop?

Now I don’t know if you can remember all the way back to this time in your life but I do remember a few bits and pieces. One of the biggest things on the mind of an eighth-graders mind is p0rn. The best place to find p0rn is on the Internet. The best way to get on the Internet is to have your very own laptop. I think you can see where I am going with this. The question is what will the council think when they start getting laptops turned in with 30 gigabytes of adult content.

The second issue is what happens when you look at lots of free p0rn, spyware. Could this be the beginning of the next one million member bot net courtesy of the one laptop per child initiative?

While we are on the subject, how will the laptops be monitored? I am assuming it is up to the individual families to provide access to the Internet. But will the city place some sort of content filter to prevent to aforementioned problems? When you are taking this object into a private home, will doing something like this effect your civil liberties?

And what of the poor parents who get a call telling them that little Jimmy has placed an encrypted volume on the computer or hacked the computer in some unforeseen way? Are the parent held responsible for the actions of their children even though they were forced into giving their child a laptop?

The bottom line is I think giving every child is a great idea, you just better be prepared for what may happen. Knowing how city council members think, they may not expect any of these bad things to happen.