Ethiopian Children Hack PCs in Five Months

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http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php

"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."

The people in charge of the project left a box containing 1,000 Android tablet PCs as a sort of project/experiment. Just like the above quote explains, one child powered it on within four minutes. Within five months, these children hacked Android and were enabling (accidentally) disabled features. That's...something.

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I thought, the kids will play with the boxes!


... Really, motherfucker? Really?

Fuck on outta here with that bullshit, you ain't dealing with goddamn cats. Fuckin' chrissakes' people needa stop fuckin' experimenting and just shut up their face holes and go help folk if they wanna help. Take all that astonishment, shove it all back up their leakin' rectums and go the fuck home if they're gonna pull that type of fuckery. Tryin' to fuck around like the Maasai don't already fucking have cellphones and Amazonian indigenous folk don't got them GPS thingies and Mongolians don't got Toyota trucks haulin' around all their shit. Swearin' like there ain't some random asshole in the middle of some fuckin' grassland texting his homie the next field over. Fuckin' piss me off with that technologically ignorant tribal people concept.

p.s. TOMS shoes ain't shit.
 
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I am not sure if I should be surprised by this piece of news. On the one hand, learning how to read, learning a language and then hacking an operating system under just five months is impressive. On the other hand, children learn ridiculously fast when compared to adults, especially if they are learning languages. Still, it is very impressive that they came so far under such a short time from basically zero knowledge base. This could lead to some interesting changes in education, and maybe immersion will be preferred to actual teaching. Only time will tell, though.