Re: child protection + anti-cheating

[Martin Langhoff]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 11:25 PM, Chris Ball  wrote:
>   > How do we prevent cheating between students?
>
> You can't prevent this.

Exactly. I've been working with online tools for education for ~8
years now, and it's interesting to note - paper+pen technology does
not prevent cheating either.

A few times I've been confronted with "this cannot possibly be used in
education until there is no way of cheating with it", ignoring that
books, pen and paper are *great* for cheating. And also for smuggling
questionable printed materials into school too -- books and folders
can hide magazines with porn or political manifestos.

Ban paper, put anyone who owns a printer in jail :-)

cheers,



martin
-- 
 martin.langh...@gmail.com
 mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
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Re: child protection + anti-cheating

[Chris Ball]

Hi Carlos,

I hope you don't mind if I give some blunt/opinionated answers:

   > How do we protect children from accessing porn or other
   > questionable content, and how do we prevent malicious persons from
   > communicating with kids, like say, child predators in IRC?

You can't prevent this, if you also want to provide Internet access.

   > Do we have mechanisms in place for those or best practices to
   > address these concerns?

"dansguardian" and "squidguard" are free pieces of software that attempt
to detect questionable content; they are often installed by schools.
You could ask questions about these on the school server-devel list.

   > How do we prevent cheating between students?

You can't prevent this.

   > Like instant messaging each other during quizzes?

The easiest way would be to have the teacher stand at the back of the
class looking for anyone doing so.  If network access is not needed
during the quiz, you could also tell the children to turn on "Extreme
Power Management" in 8.2.0 (which turns off the wireless radio), and
then the green wireless LED lights on the front of the XOs should
remain visibly off for the duration of the quiz.

Hope this helps,

- Chris.
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child protection + anti-cheating

[Carlos Nazareno]

Hi guys.

Here's one problem we have.

How do we protect children from accessing porn or other questionable
content, and how do we prevent malicious persons from communicating
with kids, like say, child predators in IRC?

It's been said that people should pass a license exam before being
allowed to use a computer and get on the internet, and for many
reasons as you guys know, this is, in a way, very true.

Unsupervised or unprepared, the internet can be very dangerous for children.

Do we have mechanisms in place for those or best practices to address
these concerns?

Of course there's IP Address blocking, but that's a game of cat and
mouse that could require a dedicated server administrator or at least
someone or a group to maintain an IP blacklist/whitelist.

Next,

How do we prevent cheating between students? Like instant messaging
each other during quizzes? We all know that we all learn great through
peer interaction, but grasp of the subject matter has to be evaluated
and tested properly, and in this case, cheating is cheating, period.

Just some concerns.

Thanks, guys!

-Naz

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Re: touchpad tunables

[pgf]

gary c martin wrote:
 > Hi Paul
 > 
 > On 10 Jan 2009, at 17:29, p...@laptop.org wrote:
 > 
 > > (i'd appreciate it someone running an 8.2.1
 > > staging candidate could verify these parameters really are present --
 > > i'm running a development kernel.)
 > 
 > Not sure if this helps, but just looked in /sys/module/psmouse/ 
 > parameters/* on an XO here running Sugar 0.82.1, Build 7, Firmware  
 > Q2E24 (not quite the v.latest so something new could have crept in). I  
 > see:

thanks gary.  i believe the new vars made it into staging 9.

paul

 > 
 >  autorecal
 >  rate
 >  resetafter
 >  resync_time
 >  tpdebug
 >  proto
 >  recalib_delta
 >  resolution
 >  smartscroll
 > 
 > Was assuming to see the new parameters your echoing to listed, so I'm  
 > assuming they are not in yet, will check again when I re-flash with  
 > the v.latest staging build.
 > 
 > --Gary

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Re: touchpad tunables

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Paul

On 10 Jan 2009, at 17:29, p...@laptop.org wrote:

> (i'd appreciate it someone running an 8.2.1
> staging candidate could verify these parameters really are present --
> i'm running a development kernel.)

Not sure if this helps, but just looked in /sys/module/psmouse/ 
parameters/* on an XO here running Sugar 0.82.1, Build 7, Firmware  
Q2E24 (not quite the v.latest so something new could have crept in). I  
see:

autorecal
rate
resetafter
resync_time
tpdebug
proto
recalib_delta
resolution
smartscroll

Was assuming to see the new parameters your echoing to listed, so I'm  
assuming they are not in yet, will check again when I re-flash with  
the v.latest staging build.

--Gary
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[ANNOUNCE] XO-LiveCD Version 090110

[WolfgangRohrmoser]

Version 090110 of the XO-LiveCD is available for download from:

  ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_090110.iso

This release is still based on the stable 8.2 build:

 http://pilgrim.laptop.org/~pilgrim/olpc/streams/8.2/build767/devel_ext3/

but has significant improvements for the Live-System runtime environment:

  - A new Content/ directory tree improves the selection of
activities, content collections and language packs as well as 
selection of additional RPM packages

  - There is a new preconfigured home/olpc directory tree packed as
 squashfs-image.
The current version contains more than 50 activities ...

  - Improved hardware detection and additional boot options especially
to get more graphic cards working

  - Updated documentation, the topics "how to create a bootable USB Pen"
and "how to install the Live-System on hard disc" have been improved

Further information is available in the PDF document:

   ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_090110.pdf

For discussion and feedback we invite you to join the mailing list:

   http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/livebackup-xo-cd


Regards

  Wolfgang Rohrmoser

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Re: touchpad tunables

[pgf]

sigh.  when am i going to learn not to tweak shell scripts
in my mailer buffer

i wrote:
 > 
 > if [ $(whoami) = root ]

please change that to 
 if [ $(whoami) != root ]

paul
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touchpad tunables

[pgf]

current staging releases (9 and higher, i believe) contain some
new parameters which were added to the mouse driver.  these
settings allow tweaking various timeouts related to touchpad
recalibration.  (i'd appreciate it someone running an 8.2.1
staging candidate could verify these parameters really are present --
i'm running a development kernel.)

by default the timeouts related to various recalibration delays
are quite conservative, leading to a total delay of 3 or 4
seconds while the touchpad autodetects jumpiness, waits before
commencing recalibrating, recalibrates, and waits to be sure no
motion was detected during the recal.  i've been using the
following script on my own XO for several weeks -- it doesn't
keep the touchpad from going bonkers, but when it does, it
recovers quite a bit more quickly.  after choosing these initial
values, i didn't do any more tuning.  if someone would like to
further investigate/improve, i'd welcome the changes.  extra
brownie points if you can get the touchpad to quit needing
recalibration at all!  :-)

i'm not quite sure where/whether/when this should go into a
release, but figured i should at the very least publish it here.

paul

#!/bin/sh

# the available touchpad parameters are as follows.  many do not
# make sense and/or do nothing on the XO:

#tpdebug:(int)
#recalib_delta:packets containing a delta this large will
#   cause a recalibration. (int)
#jumpy_delay:delay (ms) before recal after jumpiness detected (int)
#spew_delay:delay (ms) before recal after packet spew detected (int)
#recal_guard_time:interval (ms) during which recal will be
#   restarted if packet received (int)
#post_interrupt_delay:delay (ms) before recal after recal
#   interrupt detected (int)
#autorecal:enable recalibration in the driver? (int)
#proto:Highest protocol extension to probe (bare, imps, exps, any).
#   Useful for KVM switches. (proto_abbrev)
#resolution:Resolution, in dpi. (uint)
#rate:Report rate, in reports per second. (uint)
#smartscroll:Logitech Smartscroll autorepeat, 1 = enabled (default),
#   0 = disabled. (bool)
#resetafter:Reset device after so many bad packets (0 = never). (uint)
#resync_time:How long can mouse stay idle before forcing resync
#   (in seconds, 0 = never). (uint)

p=/sys/module/psmouse/parameters

if [ $(whoami) = root ]
then
echo must be root >&2
exit 1
fi


( echo Before: ; grep ^ $p/* ) >/tmp/cur_psmouse_params

if [ "$1" = show ]
then
cat /tmp/cur_psmouse_params
exit
fi

echo Setting mouse parameters:

# all values in milliseconds

echo 200 >$p/jumpy_delay
echo 200 >$p/spew_delay
echo 400 >$p/recal_guard_time
echo 100 >$p/post_interrupt_delay

( echo After: ; grep ^ $p/* ) | diff /tmp/cur_psmouse_params -

exit

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Re: automatic reminder of 'software update' when installing a new build

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 10.01.2009, at 12:53, S Page wrote:
> If the activity developer has somehow learned how to update activity
> versions (again I ask *is this documented anywhere?!*)

The canonical documentation AFAIK is the update_url section of  
the .info file in bundles:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_bundles#.info_File_Format

This in turn links to the updater "micro format":

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_microformat

- Bert -

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Re: automatic reminder of 'software update' when installing a new build

[S Page]

Daniel Drake wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 8:15 AM, Mikus Grinbergs  wrote:
>> WHERE are they supposed to look to determine whether a "newer"
>> version of an Activity is available for their (e.g., 657) builds ?
>> [Their builds are __older__ than 8.2.]

For 8.1, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bert%27s_script would automatically 
download and install "latest" versions of activities compatible with 
8.1, but it looks like the page that drives it, 
http://mock.laptop.org/repos/local.update1/XOS/index.html , hasn't been 
updated for a while.

If the activity developer has somehow learned how to update activity 
versions (again I ask *is this documented anywhere?!*) then she can use 
'edit with form' tab on her activity's page to check off, for multiple 
versions, all the releases they work on.  E.g. the bottom of 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Chat has:
   Activity version number: 40
   The releases with which this version
   of the activity has been tested. 8.1.1 (708)

> We just need someone to create G1G1/8.1 (for build 7xx) and G1G1/7.1
> (for build 65x) pages on the wiki, with appropriate content.

As I understand it releases prior to 8.2.0 lack the Software Update 
control panel, so such a page would only be for users to read.

*If* all activity developers knew which version worked on say 8.1.0 and 
put this in their activity's page, then the wiki would have the needed 
info for such a G1G1/8.1 page.  Unfortunately, the current 
implementation of the form and templates for activities means you can't 
simply run a query to "show the version and URL of all activities that 
are flagged as working on 8.1.0."  The best a query can do is show you a 
list of _potential_ versions for 8.1.0 -- see 


Some day I'll write a proposal to make this work better for activity 
maintainers and users, but I don't fully understand what's already 
present...

--
=S
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Re: status of forks

[Peter Robinson]

>> I don't think there are any other than the kernel that are forked for
>> hardware issues, and the stock Fedora i386 kernel will work with the
>> XO but the likes of numerous ethernet/storage drivers, ISA, MCA, Token
>> Ring and the like are of little use for the device :-) . There use to
>> be a HW issue in the shipped gstreamer that caused it be be forked but
>> I'm not aware of any other hardware issues in mainline kernel issues.
>>
>
>
> Keyboard definitions (xkeyboard-config) are another cause of forks.
> However, it will be pretty easy to use them in the standard Fedora
> package as well, and many of the patches are already in upstream
> Freedesktop repos.

Well all the xkeryboard-config definitions that were shipped as
patches in 8.2.0 are upstreamed. I filed the upstream bug myself, let
me know if there's anymore and I'll get them upstreamed. From the time
I filed the bug to when they appeared in the rawhide (now Fedora 10)
package was around a week. The maintainer is very responsive.

Peter
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Re: status of forks

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 3:17 PM, Peter Robinson  wrote:
>> I see two classes of forks
>>
>> 1. forks to use different compile/packaging options to eliminate
>> dependancies
>>
>> 2. forks to change the code (adding functionality in particular)
>>
>> I'm not _that_ interested in #1, but am very interested in #2, especially
>> anything done to make things work with the XO hardware.
>
> I don't think there are any other than the kernel that are forked for
> hardware issues, and the stock Fedora i386 kernel will work with the
> XO but the likes of numerous ethernet/storage drivers, ISA, MCA, Token
> Ring and the like are of little use for the device :-) . There use to
> be a HW issue in the shipped gstreamer that caused it be be forked but
> I'm not aware of any other hardware issues in mainline kernel issues.
>


Keyboard definitions (xkeyboard-config) are another cause of forks.
However, it will be pretty easy to use them in the standard Fedora
package as well, and many of the patches are already in upstream
Freedesktop repos.
Thanks,
Sayamindu

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Re: status of forks

[david]

On Sat, 10 Jan 2009, Peter Robinson wrote:

>>> I don't think there are any other than the kernel that are forked for
>>> hardware issues, and the stock Fedora i386 kernel will work with the
>>> XO but the likes of numerous ethernet/storage drivers, ISA, MCA, Token
>>> Ring and the like are of little use for the device :-) . There use to
>>> be a HW issue in the shipped gstreamer that caused it be be forked but
>>> I'm not aware of any other hardware issues in mainline kernel issues.
>>
>> one thing that comes to mind is power management. I keep hearing that the
>> builds of other distros running on the XO don't do that properly yet
>> (although I last heard that almost a week ago, so it may be old news now ;-)
>
> Not sure about that one.
>
>> another is the camera driver
>
> What's wrong with the camera driver?

the common reports seem to be that the camera is detected, but the result 
is garbage (affected by motion in front of the camera, but pixels not 
being read in the right order or something lke that)

David Lang
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Re: status of forks

[Peter Robinson]

>> I don't think there are any other than the kernel that are forked for
>> hardware issues, and the stock Fedora i386 kernel will work with the
>> XO but the likes of numerous ethernet/storage drivers, ISA, MCA, Token
>> Ring and the like are of little use for the device :-) . There use to
>> be a HW issue in the shipped gstreamer that caused it be be forked but
>> I'm not aware of any other hardware issues in mainline kernel issues.
>
> one thing that comes to mind is power management. I keep hearing that the
> builds of other distros running on the XO don't do that properly yet
> (although I last heard that almost a week ago, so it may be old news now ;-)

Not sure about that one.

> another is the camera driver

What's wrong with the camera driver?

Peter
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Re: status of forks

[david]

On Sat, 10 Jan 2009, Peter Robinson wrote:

>> I see two classes of forks
>>
>> 1. forks to use different compile/packaging options to eliminate
>> dependancies
>>
>> 2. forks to change the code (adding functionality in particular)
>>
>> I'm not _that_ interested in #1, but am very interested in #2, especially
>> anything done to make things work with the XO hardware.
>
> I don't think there are any other than the kernel that are forked for
> hardware issues, and the stock Fedora i386 kernel will work with the
> XO but the likes of numerous ethernet/storage drivers, ISA, MCA, Token
> Ring and the like are of little use for the device :-) . There use to
> be a HW issue in the shipped gstreamer that caused it be be forked but
> I'm not aware of any other hardware issues in mainline kernel issues.

one thing that comes to mind is power management. I keep hearing that the 
builds of other distros running on the XO don't do that properly yet 
(although I last heard that almost a week ago, so it may be old news now 
;-)

another is the camera driver

David Lang
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Re: automatic reminder of 'software update' when installing a new build

[Daniel Drake]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 8:15 AM, Mikus Grinbergs  wrote:
> WHERE are they supposed to look to determine whether a "newer"
> version of an Activity is available for their (e.g., 657) builds ?
> [Their builds are __older__ than 8.2.]

Unfortunately, we do not have any page set up for this, and I don't
think the core activity developers do any real testing of new
activities vs old OS releases. As you have observed, we have enough
trouble stabilising one release (9.1), working on 2 is even harder
(9.1 + 8.2.1) and adding activity maintenance on even older releases
into the mix is an even bigger drain on resources.

That said, this is a community project, do you feel up to the task? :)
We just need someone to create G1G1/8.1 (for build 7xx) and G1G1/7.1
(for build 65x) pages on the wiki, with appropriate content.

cheers
Daniel
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Re: status of forks

[Peter Robinson]

> I see two classes of forks
>
> 1. forks to use different compile/packaging options to eliminate
> dependancies
>
> 2. forks to change the code (adding functionality in particular)
>
> I'm not _that_ interested in #1, but am very interested in #2, especially
> anything done to make things work with the XO hardware.

I don't think there are any other than the kernel that are forked for
hardware issues, and the stock Fedora i386 kernel will work with the
XO but the likes of numerous ethernet/storage drivers, ISA, MCA, Token
Ring and the like are of little use for the device :-) . There use to
be a HW issue in the shipped gstreamer that caused it be be forked but
I'm not aware of any other hardware issues in mainline kernel issues.

Peter
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Re: status of forks

[david]

On Sat, 10 Jan 2009, Peter Robinson wrote:

>>> There's a discussion going on right now at FUDCon with gregdek and cjb
>>> running down the 20 or so forked packages and smoothing out how to
>>> merge them back in.  So there should be helpful updates soon.
>>
>> Don't forget that we have not yet forked F10 to the extent that we did
>> F9 to get rid of perl, libgnome, etc. But get rid of those 20 and
>> we'll be well on our way :)
>
> From my last serious look at this I seem to remember most of those are
> pulled in by xulrunner.

I see two classes of forks

1. forks to use different compile/packaging options to eliminate 
dependancies

2. forks to change the code (adding functionality in particular)

I'm not _that_ interested in #1, but am very interested in #2, especially 
anything done to make things work with the XO hardware.

David Lang
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Re: status of forks

[Peter Robinson]

>> There's a discussion going on right now at FUDCon with gregdek and cjb
>> running down the 20 or so forked packages and smoothing out how to
>> merge them back in.  So there should be helpful updates soon.
>
> Don't forget that we have not yet forked F10 to the extent that we did
> F9 to get rid of perl, libgnome, etc. But get rid of those 20 and
> we'll be well on our way :)

>From my last serious look at this I seem to remember most of those are
pulled in by xulrunner.

Peter
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Re: automatic reminder of 'software update' when installing a new build

[Mikus Grinbergs]

 I have seen the wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/G1G1/8.2 page list
 Activity versions that were *older* than those listed for "plain"
 G1G1.
>>> That's exactly as it is supposed to work. G1G1 lists dev versions,
>>> G1G1/8.2 the stable versions tested with 8.2.

I did say 'o.k.' to this explanation (speaking for myself).

But the point I am concerned about is that there might be thousands 
of XOs out in the field whose owners I presume have not bothered to 
upgrade to 8.2.  Such owners might still want to look at the wiki.

WHERE are they supposed to look to determine whether a "newer" 
version of an Activity is available for their (e.g., 657) builds ?
[Their builds are __older__ than 8.2.]


> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Software_updater#Activity_groups explains:
> "the unsuffixed version of the group URL will always contain the latest
> versions of the activities for the very latest build".

When such people (whom I describe above) acquired their XOs, they 
were told these were "G1G1".   But [as this thread describes] now 
the "unsuffixed G1G1" URL lists versions of Activities presumably 
meant for builds __newer__ than 8.2.

See the potential confusion for some viewers ?


mikus



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