Ethiopian Kids Hacked Their Donated Tablets In Just Five Months | Hacker News Reader

Ethiopian Kids Hacked Their Donated Tablets In Just Five Months

fastcoexist.com

69 pointsthingummywut21 comments

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

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.

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

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

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

All poor people look the same.

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.

You took the parent post in completely the wrong way, it's my opinion that he was pointing out exactly what you wish he had said purposefully in the most offensive way possible to show how flawed the choice of photo was.

You're probably right, it just didn't occurred to me. Thanks.

Either you do not get sarcasm, or very, very good at it yourself.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

They carry apps in buckets on their heads for miles.

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

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.

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?.

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'.

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

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