When the folks over at Praxis Engineering and Proteus Technologies saw my “No-Tech Hacking” talk at a local conference, they realized the talk was a great way to promote security awareness for their employees. So they scheduled the talk as part of their NSA-required annual security training program. The talk was a smashing success, and an overwhelming number of their employees commented that it was”the best training they had ever attended”. Not bad for a talk about something as potentially dry as operational security and awareness. But that’s not the best part of the story. Wanting to support our classroom initiative, they purchased twenty brand new Dell Vostro 1000 laptops and donated them to us in exchange for the talk!

These are the first new computers we’ve had donated, and they’re headed right to East Africa where they will be used in classroom labs we’ve installed (like this one in Uganda). We’re going to honor the donation by stretching it as far as possible. As it stands right now, these computers can only serve twenty children at a time. Our goal is to allow more than one student at a time. Through the use of the OLPC as a “thin” client and software from Microsoft and IPConsult, this could become a reality, allowing forty, sixty, one-hundred students or more to work simultaneously on these systems!

Update: Our request from IPConsult for donated copies of their XP-based terminal server software was declined. We are still seeking a viable solution from Microsoft to somehow use these machines as light servers to be used by more than one child.