

Ethiopian Kids Hacked Their Donated Tablets In Just Five Months - thingummywut
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681011/ethiopian-kids-hacked-their-donated-tablets-in-just-five-months

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guylhem
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

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tankbot
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.

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Pr0
Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4724660>

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

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runn1ng
All poor people look the same.

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jlmendezbonini
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.

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shanelja
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.

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

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lolnope
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?

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sopooneo
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.

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

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dhughes
They carry apps in buckets on their heads for miles.

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JulianMorrison
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?.

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vacri
_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'.

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

