Some fascinating news out of the One Laptop Per Child project. Just given a box of these laptops, with no instructions, Ethiopian children discovered the device had a camera and figured out how to enable it.
MIT has installed memory cards that record how the devices are used and one of their founders reports:
We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.
Fascinating.
Funny story. Next they will be hacking the MIT mainframe back through the cards they installed, stealing the identity and bank accounts of all the MIT staff just so they can set up a spam program that sends emails to everyone in North America telling them they won the Ethiopian lottery. 🙂