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Reuters shocked that OLPC testers using XO for XXX
You know it's a pretty slow summer Friday on the Reuters news beat when one of the biggest stories making the rounds focuses on the shocking revelation that Nigerian students are using their shiny new OLPC XOs to do what hormonal young men have being doing since the dawn of time: look at naked women. The esteemed wire service's African correspondent breathlessly reports that a journalist from the News Agency of Nigeria had seen pornography on a few children's notebooks, which led the country's publication of record to surmise that "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." Why, the NAN report makes it sound like these kids are spending their days at some seedy adult bookstore and not even attending school at all. Luckily for the porn-addicted youngsters, administrators of the pilot program are aware of this snowballing crisis, and will soon be installing filters that will very likely block out a slew of legitimate pages while still allowing curious students to see all the flesh they want on Myspace. Will someone please think of the children?[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Reports of four million OLPCs greatly exaggerated
Ah-ha, so it turns out those four million OLPCs may not actually be bagged after all -- big surprise. Apparently the mixup began when OLPC program director for Middle East and Africa Khaled Hassounah supposedly told DesktopLinux that Nigeria had committed to an order of a million units, and Argentina, Brazil, and Thailand were right behind them with "similar" orders of their own. Except not really. According to ZDNet UK, that information is flat-out "incorrect," according to OLPC, and that despite Hassounah's statements they're not yet prepared to distribute commercialized versions of the device. Taking pre-commercial device orders for something like the OLPC is absolutely nothing out of the realm of the ordinary in our opinion, but it seems like a little PR-spurned informational infighting has turned the project from "pedagogically suspect" to factually suspect overnight. Perhaps we should leave them to their device-making for now, and worry later about who is and isn't placing orders for quantities of computers large enough to make even the thinnest-margin manufacturers sweat and drool. [Thanks, Cyrus and Alexandre]
