The One Laptop Per Child project, a nonprofit begun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, aims to improve education by giving children bright-colored, hand-cranked, wireless-enabled portable computers by 2008.

|PIC1|In its penultimate year of development, the team are now focusing on its security measures.

With 7 seven million units to be released by Governments in Thailand, Nigeria, Brazil and Argentina, officials are expecting them to be a large target for mischief and hence the machines' programmers are now placing precautions in place.

Starting from scratch they are designing new security protocols which they hope will greatly surpass those found in mass-market computers today.

Testing their approach with outside security experts - they already believe the security setup could make it unnecessary for the laptops to have anti-virus software.

The $100 laptops will force any application to run in "a walled garden" and limit files it can access, said Ivan Krstic, a software architect on the project.

This is in stark contrast to standard computer design, generally allowing programs to access any file stored anywhere on the machine.

"It's essentially unbelievably difficult to do anything to the machine that would cause permanent hardware failure," Krstic said.

The machines, due to be completed by June 2008, have already been ordered by Libya in a $250 million deal for its 1.2 million school children.

To find out more about the project click here.