It’s true that no matter what part of the world we’re from, people are generally the same.  This can certainly be seen with the discovery reported by Reuters Africa that some children using their $100 laptops on the internet are surfing for porn.

What I don’t understand, though, is the response that this has generated from the News Agency of Nigeria.  According to the quote in Reuters, NAN is saying:

“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”

Come now … you can’t seriously tell me that nobody thought that students might surf for porn if given the resources of the world wide web.  Males (I’m assuming it was males that were saving these images) have been captivated by porn ever since the first cave drawings where very busty female stick figures are seen, generaly in a family setting.  I dare anyone to show me a group of males between the ages of 9 and 29 that haven’t looked at porn.  Even in countries like Iran and Syria you can get your hands on this stuff … so long as you know where to look.

So now that this bit of information has been given to the One Laptop Per Child aid group, the organization has said that future notebooks will be fitted with filters.

Gah!  This is only going to make things worse!

Adding data filters to these cheap educational tools will only make the students try harder to get their hands on images of scantily clad people in all sorts of scenarios.  Add to this the idea that now people from the West are telling people in Nigeria what they’re permitted to see and learn.  A dangerous slope to walk on, for sure.

Porn isn’t really a bad thing, per se.  Sure, it has been deemed immoral for a very long time, but I try to look at the brighter side of the equation.  If young men are introduced to porn, they might be content to not engage in real intercourse for a while.  This could potentially slow down the spread of AIDS, as it’s a little hard to catch STIs if your partner is also your hand.

Of course there are a bunch of “if” statements in that last statement but, looking at typical male patterns, this might do more good than harm.

That said, if the Nigerian’s become really good at getting around filters and security methods that we pre-install on their computers, they might just learn how to circumvent everything we throw at them.  We wouldn’t have to worry about North Korean hackers, anymore.  Instead, everyone would be afraid of the Nigerians that not only spam us to death, but get into our PCs from their charity notebook computers.