Bitfrost: the OLPC security model [LWN.net]

Bitfrost: the OLPC security model

Posted Feb 8, 2007 19:18 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
Parent article: Bitfrost: the OLPC security model

It seems like these machines are actually owned by the government or the school department, rather than the children. Which is fine, really. When I was a schoolchild, my school owned the textbooks I used. So this is really a scheme by which the owner of a laptop can secure it in certain ways and to a certain extent against people who have physical access to the machine.

I assume that these devices will have to be returned by their users once they aren't children any more. If nothing else, the users will need a phyiscally larger interface eventually.

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Bitfrost: the OLPC security model

Posted Feb 10, 2007 1:59 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

Nothing is entirely owned by one person. Lots of people have varying kinds and degrees of ownership interest in anything. These machines are owned to a large degree by the user. It's to a lesser degree than a computer one of us might buy for personal use, but to a larger degree than a computer issued to us by our employer.

In property law, one of the most important ownership interests is the right to use and exclude others from using the item. The OLPC users seem to have a pretty strong one of those rights.

(Incidentally, that's why in real estate, a tenant is more of an owner than a landlord, even though we conventionally call the landlord the "owner.")

Bitfrost: the OLPC security model

Posted Feb 15, 2007 13:10 UTC (Thu) by arcticwolf (guest, #8341) [Link]

In property law, one of the most important ownership interests is the right to use and exclude others from using the item. The OLPC users seem to have a pretty strong one of those rights.

Which country's laws are you talking about, specifically? Without wanting to comment on the question of who will be (or, for that matter, *should* be) considered the owner of the laptops, it seems like a bad idea to me to argue based on "the law" when there is not actually such a thing as "the law", but rather a host of different kinds of legal systems with different laws. How much DO you know about property law in, say, Brazil, China, India or Rwanda?

Bitfrost: the OLPC security model

Posted Feb 16, 2007 3:25 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

Yes, there's no such thing as "the law," and if you look carefully, you'll see I don't refer to "the" law. I'm talking about property law in general -- it's a matter of jurisprudence, not the law of any particular jurisdiction.

The reason I'm speaking so generally is that this thread isn't concerned with the legal aspects of owning these laptops; it's about a more abstract idea of ownership, as in the idea some people have that if you "own" a computer, you should be able to run whatever software on it you want. I brought up property law as an example of how ownership isn't as simple as many people seem to think it is. While governments implement various rules with respect to ownership, lawyers broadly agree on the underlying concepts.