OLPC in developing countries

update: quantum cryptography

2008-01-01T14:17:00.000+01:00

about quantum cryptography

Quantum cryptography is the oldest and best developed application of the field of quantum information science. Although it is frequently perceived as an encryption method, it is really a scheme to securely distribute correlated random numbers between the communicating parties and thus better described as quantum key distribution (QKD). Any attempt at eavesdropping from a third party is guarantied to be detected by the laws of physics (quantum mechanics) and shows up as an increased error rate in the transmission (the QBER).

the xo laptop and quantum key distribution

Prof. Christian Kurtsiefer, Prof. Antia Lamas and others from the

Quantum Information Technology Lab
Quantum Optics Section
Department of Physics
National University of Singapore
2 Science Drive 3
117542 Singapore

have been at the 24C3, giving a lecture on Quantum Cryptography and Possible Attacks (Video) and demonstrating the hardware of a full working kit developed in the National University of Singapore for entanglement based QKD over a free space channel.

That device is accessible via usb and was built up at the ccc on the first floor. They got interested in the xo, sj gave them a few to play, and they started implementing their software for quantum key distribution.

After a few hours of tinkering with the kernel config, timezones (the xo's had to be synchronized with an accuracy of at least 0.5 sec) and software dependencies, they successfully tested the first 'entanglement based quantum key distribution' between xo laptops (Sa, 29.12.07)! And yes, they enjoyed it! : )

@ 24C3 + new contributor program + quantum cryptography on the XO!

2007-12-30T15:58:00.000+01:00

We (Tano, Chris, SJ, /me) are at the 24th CCC congress. First of all : great presentations, hilarious hacks and a very good atmosphere.

We presented OLPC there and asked people to sign up for the new contributor program. We immediately got some very good proposals.
And what is more.. there was a great group from the Univ. of Singapore which immediately ported their quantum cryptography key exchange software to the XO. So much for "the OLPC laptop is slow". The QDK program was doing FFTs and statistical correlations. In the pictures you can see a photon transmittor (sounds fancy ;-)doing the actual quantum crypto - the rest of the data comes in via USB to the XO where it is correlated with each other.

Other highlights from the 24C3 are flying quadcopters, remote controlled robot UAVs (flying planes) which were in France but given waypoints from here in Berlin. Also the openwrt guys made a proof of concept by porting openwrt to the XO. The astounding fact there - openwrt boots in around 20 seconds! Xterms open instantaneously and everything is much faster in general. Small is beautiful.

comic

2007-12-14T22:24:00.001+01:00

By James Chung with apologies to Mr. Watterson

givemany hack

2007-11-13T02:41:00.000+01:00

Those german hackers....

Three students from Germany started olpc-deutschland.de which looks like the Austrian grassroots organization. But seems like they want to order via the givemany program and then distribute locally. But this does not work, according to Samuel Klein (SJ). The give many program is only intended to reach educational institutions. I confirmed this in a Skype chat with SJ.


aaron 1:37 AM
question: there seems to be a collective order for givemany at http://olpc-deutschland.de (not known to me) . 
They want to pool orders for givemany . I thought the givemany XOs should *only* go to schools/educational 
institutes or be ordered by them? Is that so?
1:38 AM 
since otherwise there would be the issue of reselling the XOs
2:20 AM 
still here?
SJ Klein 2:33 AM
yes
2:33 AM 
reading
2:33 AM 
sorry
aaron 2:34 AM
np
SJ Klein 2:34 AM
yes, givemany laptops only go to ed institutions
aaron 2:34 AM
ok

weekly OLPC.at status report #3

2007-11-12T03:02:00.000+01:00

1. Ministry of education
2. Germany's OLPC group
3. Activity/Sugar handbook
4. Dr. Lozanov's DE-suggestobpaedia ;-)
5. presswork preview
6. we need more dev laptops

1. Ministry of education

We had another talk with the Austrian ministry of education concerning how the Austrian pilot can and how it should be handled.
Just one comment: getting there... be patient .

2. Germany's OLPC group

We had some talks with Bert Freudenberg, Joachim Wedekind, Yokoy about the founding of a german OLPC grassroots group.
Seems like we were able to pull something off... Germany, now it is your turn! ;-) Create an e.V. or so hm?

3. Activity / Sugar handbook

We all met on Saturday on our almost weekly jam session night. Christoph and Daja (Daniel Jahre) were continuing to write on the Activity / Sugar handbook. The others were busy planning, hacking on the a very nice embedded board (more about that later when it is ready), upgrading the XOs, coding , etc. Christoph got javascript and flash working and got SIM CITY to work ! yeah!

4. Dr. Lozanov's DEsuggestopaedia ;-)

Tano and /me went to Dr. Lozanov. He was one of the most famous bulgarian educators. Dr. Lozanov invented superlearning, a method which enables you to learn languages quicker. We wanted to talk with him if he could imagine some sort of audio .ogg files on the XO for language learning. But alas! he was not here. A big fat sign on his door showed us that he was not interested in his own suggestopaedia method. It read "Dr. Lozanov. International Institute for DEsuggestopaedia" wow!

5. Press preview

Tomorrow we will meet with FM4 (most famous youth radio station in .at) and the day after with ORF konkret (TV).

6. we need more dev laptops

Lindsay , Walter, SJ? Please, in case you have a few extra C1s or B4s... Jaume is stuck with coding XOTv. He is stuck waiting until the other XOs are free. So we need another one or two XOs to speed up.

weekly status report OLPC.at

2007-11-05T01:37:00.000+01:00

This goes out to other grassroot groups. We would like to encourage you too to send out weekly info posts of what happened in your country. Helps to understand where the whole project is going and what local grassroot groups can do and what they achieved.

So, I will start with our group

OLPC Austria newsletter #2

elevate.at

We have been presenting the ideas behind OLPC and our XOs at the elevate.at festival in Graz Austria.
Graz is a lovely small city. It has the worlds biggest collection of medival knights armor, the "Schlossberg" a castle on a small mountain in the middle of the city and a very active young students scene.

Then moved on to Kiblix. See the posts below.
Graz and Kiblix was just amazing! So many people got interested. I guess we will see a OLPC Graz section soon.

A few days later we got an email about the wish to found of "OLPC Germany e.V." (eigentragener Verein, registered association) modeled after OLPC.at. Bert Freudenberg will be there, Yoko will be there,... folks are interested in doing that, let's see what happens.

After Graz we all needed some days off.

next steps

* Austrian pilot: there is lot of organizational work for that!
* activity challenge: expect some progress here
* activity handbook: same

I am curious about your grassroot experiences and progresses. Please report! Let's get more connected on these issues.

olpc in nigeria ^H aeh.. mandriave aehh... microsoft??

2007-11-02T11:53:00.000+01:00

seems like mandriva got the classmate deal in nigeria . However! Francois from Mandriva was tricked by M$. Well, looks like it! woah! What kind of biz practices...

Presentation in Slovenia (Kiblix)

2007-10-26T19:02:00.000+02:00

We moved from Graz down south to Slovenia. Presenting OLPC + Sascha Meinrath at the Kiblix festival. Kiblix is a linux open source festival in Maribor. The topics there are creative commons, free networks and general for fun hacking topics.

I was just asked by Peter if our presentation can be uploaded to his videolectures.net site. I did not know that this site is pretty large! ~ 2000 video lectures in the field of IT. Looks like a very interesting site.

weekly status report OLPC.at

2007-10-21T16:58:00.000+02:00

We (olpc austria) decided to copy Walter Bender and send out a weekly status summary.
This goes out to the other grassroot groups in the hope that it will foster further intra-country communication.

NEWS

1. Elevate.at
2. Activity Handbook
3. T-Shirts
4. XoTV

1. Elevate.at

We will be presenting the OLPC concept and our (development)XOs at the elevate.at festival in Graz, Austria. In case you live nearby, please come and visit us. We will be happy to have a chat with you and you can test the XOs yourself.

2. Activity Handbook

Christoph Derndorfer, Daniel Jahre and maybe(?) Helga Schmid (Helga?) will be working on the Activity/Sugar Handbook. In case you have any comments or anything that needs to be mentioned, please contact them

3. T-shirts

In case you want a T-shirt, please contact Simon Dorner

4. XoTV

Jaume and me have been hacking on XoTV. The idea of XoTV is to be able to stream video to a central streaming server which in turn can stream back to a large number of clients. Imagine mini TV station in your hands.
This is not quite the same as Youtube because the streams do not necessarily have to be stored.
the backend behind XoTV works (Giss.tv) and was tested, we are currently still working on the frontend and UI side.

thinking about open hardware...

2007-10-10T22:57:00.001+02:00

freifunk has a nice discussion on how to create simple open hardware for mesh routing.

background material for presenting the XO at the TU

2007-10-08T00:58:00.000+02:00

Well, here is the full "did you know" video:

I do not agree with many of the said things but I do agree that we did have a tremendous exponential growth in the last x*100 years. I do not know when this will stop or if it will continue for a long time.
So takling this information explosion is one of the main challenges. How to do it?
Well, one thing is the brilliant capability of the human mind to work with abstractions. I consider mathematicians and physicists to be quite good at that. But creativity seems to be equally important.
Talking about creativity! I was very astonished by Sir Ken Robinson's presentation at TED: wow!

And when we listen to Richard Feynmann talk about his own upbringing and education, we can actually grasp how the curiosity of children is working and how it is also kept alive! I highly recommend this video.

And finally when we listen to Hans Rosling who spent years in Africa we find out that actually the world is not just "poor developing countries" versus the "rich west" but that there is a new huge middle class worldwide. If this middle class now gets access to very good education, then a lot can and will change.

Big demo/ presentation at the TU Vienna

2007-10-07T23:22:00.000+02:00

So, tomorrow me and Christoph Derndorfer have a big demo of the XOs at the Technical University of Vienna.
We hope to first of all explain OLPC to a wide audience of students, assistants and professors (pfew! the mail went out to all of them!) and second of all, we would like to motivate people to contribute.

I feel quite stressed about it :)

We have been preparing our demo for 2 days. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

shared activities video

2007-07-29T23:57:00.001+02:00

I had some time (well, I actually had not :) to play around with the new 535 XO firmware. So I tested the shared activity paradigma. I believe this is quite crucial. Here is a small video showing how children will be able to collaborate. Please note that I was only typing on the left laptop.

Same with the "chat" activity. As you might have guessed, this is a regular chat program not unlike iChat. Nice thing: thanks to the mesh you can automatically invite whoever is close to you. In the picture above the left XO has a chat with the right one.

XO design works!

2007-07-20T19:09:00.000+02:00

Recently on one of our weekly Wednesday OLPC Austria meetings, little Said (the name of the boy) was here and he was playing around with the XO-1 laptop.

Later he went home and drew a picture of the laptop. We were all astonished how well he remembered the details and the functionality of the laptop! This gave me a very good feeling how well the actual XO will work in the hands of kids.

I must note that it is really a BIG joy to work together with so many smart people all with different backgrounds.

OLPC Austria grassroot community works

2007-06-10T20:18:00.000+02:00

Thanks to Wayan from olpcnews.com. Olpcnews is a big site for reading about the OLPC project - although not to be confused with the official OLPC news feed. Sometimes OLPCNews is very critical to the whole project but - on the other hand - that is also what it takes - constructive criticism is important. Wayan took my article and posted it. Thanks! I am very curious how the solar mesh node develops.
Meanwhile we founded the OLPC local austrian grassroots developer community. Bertl from bitfrost fame is part of it and others are gearing up and experimenting with the XOs we got from OLPC. Stay tuned for results.

presenting the XO in Vienna

2007-06-01T17:24:00.000+02:00

I presented the XO at the local linux weeks in Vienna on Sat, 2nd of June.
I hope to get some developers to join in some python coding sessions. The local media reported about it.

My slides are here.

One very nice experience was when one of our younger colleagues was explaining the laptop to grown ups.

On 2007/06/03 ORF1, the main Austrian TV station, will report on the XOs during prime time.
Here you can find an excerpt from the report which was broadcasted

OLSR 4 OLPC

2007-05-28T17:50:00.000+02:00

I compiled the OLSR (RFC 3626) routing daemon for the XO. Nothing hard, just nice to have. I can imagine that in cases when there is no school server one XO will be re-used for internet uplink (f.ex. via the USB ethernet adapter). In these cases OLSR can be helpful on the external interface.

pre-compiled binary: link and olsrd.conf.

Ah yes! it is tested of course :)

@MIT

2007-05-22T01:14:00.000+02:00

I had the honor of visiting the MIT campus. In one sentence: wonderful place! Smart people, nice atmosphere.

The One cambridge center - where the One Laptop Per Child offices are and where it is being designed and developed

OLPC is testing solar cell panels for the roofs of schools.

These panels are strong enough to power a gang charger which can charge the batteries for the laptops of one class. The gang charger can furthermore be connected to normal power sockets.

In case the solar cells are not available there will be another option: the spindle!

Everybody asks "what happened with the hand crank?" However the hand crank is a bit to fragile. Tests have shown that the force on the mainboard is to big. So... here comes the spindle. The current ratio is 1:10. One minue of spinning the spindle = 10 minutes laptop use.

mesh networks are being tested directly at the office . In the office spaces you can see XOs hanging from the ceiling, and in each corner. The natural tendency is to touch them and explore them, but a "DO NOT DISTURB" sticker reminds you that this is actually a mesh test cluster. As I discussed with Michail, having a moving mesh will actually be something else.
But this test setup can already give you a good impression of a school class.

Michail Bletsas holding a mesh repeater. This nice little device will be quite cheap and will run with solar power

These mesh repeaters will be connected to this solar panel.

The current design idea looks like this

arrived

2007-05-03T16:40:00.000+02:00

The little things arrived. Firmware upgrade, you are next.

100$ for a laptop? Can't be true!

2007-05-02T12:14:00.000+02:00

Hehe, here is a nice one for lighting up your day.

The shipment was delayed. When I called at DHL they said that customs was still keeping the package since they don't believe the pro-forma invoice. 100$ for a laptop must be much to cheap in their opinion. So I had to send them a link to the laptop.org page explaining what it is etc.

I wonder how the logistics for a complete country rollout will look then :)

XOs are on their way!

2007-04-29T00:02:00.000+02:00

The XOs were sent off yesterday. Curious how the real thing actually looks and feels like. So far I have only been using the qemu simulator.