Article: Slashdot says.. AU Government To Build "Unhackable" Netbooks
The Australian government has taken it upon itself to hand out 240,000 laptops to grade 9 and up students over the next 4 years. Which I think is a commendable initiative. The catch is all the laptops will be preloaded with security measures to prevent students from installing their own programs or changing the laptop configurations in any way.
The laptops are loaded with Windows 7 Enterprise and use its AppLocker functionality in Windows 7 to only allow approved programs to be installed. I think this is a very bad idea since students will be locked into a limited set of software that once out in the real world they will likely have to switch from.
An example would be Symphony the Open Office based office suite that IBM just completed the mandatory company wide migration from MS Office. And there are many companies that see the advantage to choosing from alternative software as well Lowe's for instance uses Lowe's Linux based thin clients for all its Point of Sale computers. The advantage for both IBM and Lowe's is that the software comes at a much lower cost since the initial licensing is free and optionally paying for developers to add needed features should be much cheaper than proprietary software.
While I am obviously pro free licensed software I don't think that the fact that these systems are preloaded with non free software is their main fault. It is the fact that these laptops are locked into the non free software with no option to change. I think it is a rather severe encroachment on freedom of choice and quite possibly a monopolistic venture on the part of Microsoft , Apple and Adobe all having their software loaded and locked in on the laptops. Another severe fault is the lojack installed on the laptops making them privacy invasion cases waiting to happen.
For the cost of $500 the laptops have quite low usability and flexibility for the students. Considering that the laptops are standard run of the mill lenovo netbooks than cost around $300 retail the Aussie government could have upped the specs on the laptops to around $450 which brings slightly more powerful graphics chips and larger screens into the picture. The other $50 dollars per laptop could have went directly to custom software development totaling around 12,000,000 dollars enough to pay 25 developers 120,000 dollars a year for 4 years. The advantages being that if they choose to load a free operating system on the laptops they could have content filtering built-in with dansgardian and additionally frequent security updates that is a trademark of open source software.
Their claim of the laptops being “unhackable” is also disputable since after all they are just standard netbooks which have easily flashable BIOS firmware and even windows 7 has supposedly unfixable exploits
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