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The $100 Laptops For Children

Keeping children in mind, the 'One Laptop Per Child' project was launched at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its basic purpose is to improve children's education by providing them colorful wireless enabled portable PCs. The plan consists of distributing $100 laptops to children around the world and expects to make a revolution in security measures aided by their low-cost economic strategy.

The laptops have gained the widespread attention while it evokes some doubt on their design component also. The computers do not have hard drives; instead will use 'Flash memory' working on Linux operating system. This would be the main factor in keeping the price of the system low.
Programmers have also harvested revolutionary tools in its security solutions. They say the given security elements in the laptops need no anti-virus software. As Ivan Krstic, a software architect, believes even if there is a fall in the security level, the laptop's specialized encryption technology will protect the BIOS software from being overwritten. . This means the PC will never fail to 'boot up'.

Since so many machines will be created, they are likely to become a large target for misuse; hence security measures must be appropriate.

A potential problem about these laptops is that when they would communicate with one another in a 'mesh' network, there would be sharing of data and programming code. At the 'ToorCon security conference' Krstic described this set up as rather 'scary'.

Walter Bender, a 'co-founder of MIT's Media Lab' who is supervising the software and the content on the laptops, said these laptops would enable children to mend the PCs as they learn to work on them. In this respect, the owners of the PCs can turn off the security updates.

Since this can lead to a disaster, the laptops are featured to automatically back up the data on a server every time the machines are in the wireless range of the children's schools. By the same principle, if a student loses data, he/ she can restore the files by setting up the laptop within the wireless ambit of the server.

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