Students Use OLPC Laptop to View Porn

Students Use OLPC Laptop to View Porn

Much has been said and spoken about the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) $100 laptop, which was planned to be distributed amongst children from underdeveloped countries, in order to put forth to them the plethora of knowledge that the world of the web offers. However, both the boons and the banes of the internet are equally known too; and perhaps Nigerian students preferred to opt for the latter.

According to the official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), instead of surfing and gaining knowledge, Nigerian children have been caught viewing pornographic images.

Reuters quoted NAN stating, “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.”

Further on, pornography was discovered on a number of the children’s laptops during NAN’s investigation into the matter.

Developers of the Laptop, U.S. based non-profit organization, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), responded to the hype, chalking it up to human nature.

“I’ve seen whole computer rooms turn into porno galleries as boobie-gazing men replace women and children as the primary customers of a center. Yes, its sad, but its also human nature,” wrote Wayan Vota, on the OLPC news blog.

Vota further added that it wasn’t very shocking for him to see teenagers were “getting a eyeful of hot coffee,” and condemned reporters for wanting a “headline grabbing story,” claiming that they may also be probably against the OLPC project on a personal level.

However, OLPC Nigeria has decided to deal with this problem by installing porn filters in all future XO computers. But all the same Vota maintains that the filters are not full-proof, naming Americans as being lazy and claiming we have already found multiple ways around them.

Though no one particular can be blamed in this matter, for some reason the OLPC people seem to take it too personally and prefer attacking the media for the same. But for a fact this kind of an event is indeed not shocking since kids invariably engage in these kinds of things. Now let’s just hope that the porn filters in the future OLPC PCs offer some help and solution towards the problem.