Kid-Safe Domain Created 657
Jadecristal writes "The Washington Post announces that President Bush has signed legislation to create a .kids.us domain. The legislation mandates that those with a .kids.us site not be allowed to link to any site outside the .kids.us domain." At the very least, it makes filtering easy.
Hrm... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Uhm (Score:3, Interesting)
Go try and register a
Not the first time (Score:4, Funny)
Why is this government-controlled? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is an excellent example of why governments should not get their hands involved.
I simply do not see why the government needs to run something like this, or put laws in place. It's quite easy for a private company to build (and spider) a *.kids.com domain or something similar. A DNS server, and a bit of spider code, maybe a few months of work. You resell DNS service to ISPs, ISPs sell it as a value-added bit to add appeal. No government intervention required.
Aside from sucking up to Republican conservatives, this simply doesn't have much point.
Furthermore, it's going to open a whole can of worms. If my tax dollars are going to support the company with the contract, what if my definition of what's "appropriate" differs from someone else? I can already see fights and lawsuits brewing over this, all of which would not be a problem if this was simply handled in the private sector.
If you want responsible citizens tomorrow, America, teach the children of today to be responsible. Let them see whatever content they want -- and teach them to deal with it responsibly.
Re:Why is this government-controlled? (Score:4, Insightful)
So why hasn't a private company done this yet?
Because there's no profit in it. A private company is not about to invest in a venture like this unless they have some assurance of making a profit from it, which these days usually requires popup ads for XXX sites and penis enlargement products.
The government, as crappy and corrupt as it is, at least makes some passing attempt at doing things for the public good. A private company, on the other hand, will only do what's good for them, and not one iota more.
Let them see whatever content they want -- and teach them to deal with it responsibly.
You obviously have no children of your own.
Re:Why is this government-controlled? (Score:3, Insightful)
I just described how a reasonable profit could be made. An ISP ships censorware combined with DNS service from this company. Not that difficult.
You obviously have no children of your own
You are correct, though your insinuation that this disqualifies me from having valid opinions on the matter is simply stupid. My ideas are based on my own childhood. My parents were always quite honest with me. They did not go out of their way to expose me to violence or nudity or deaths in the family, but they never attempted to hide it or lie about it. Whenever possible, they'd go over something like this with me. If they said that driving a car without a seat belt was a bad idea, they'd justify it.
I have tremendous respect for my parents because of this. I think that this is not something innate. Parents that say that children should simply follow their morals and instructions because they "are their parents" *might* have gratitude or at least control over rewards and punishments to the child to try to force them to follow their own ideals. They might succeed, at least in the short term. But I think that such a parent could never achieve the same sense of trust that I had with my parents.
Children follow their parents' lead best when their parents have shown themselves to be consistently right, not when they try to force children to follow their lead. If you want a child who will be a leader, who will be responsible and independent, then I think you need to raise him in such an environment.
I know this will probably rankle a few parents -- everyone has their own ideas on what is best for a child. I still think that honesty really *is* the best policy. Let your children know the weaker, less perfect side of people. Let them see their parents as human -- loving humans, someone that they can be friends with as well as child to. A parent shouldn't try to be a God-like being that issues edicts from on high.
Re:Why is this government-controlled? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bla...bla....bla....
if is soo easy for it to happen then why didn't it?
usually the government steps in when industry fails.. and yes the "internet" industry has failed miserably to control it's self. with pors sites intentionally popping up with similar names to kids toys and sites the kids would go to. just have your 10 year old daughter type in www.bratzdolls.com and have your porn full.
I as a father am sick and tired of the idiots and morons like you screaming "there isn't a need! there isn't any trouble!" and I am sick and tired of having to chase my daughter out of the room so I can search and find what she wants so she isnt attacked by the ration of 2 to one of porn on topics she wants information on.
when she searches for britiney spears... she shoud not get 60 porn sites
I personally think that they should force all porn to
the internet is a information trading tool... not a porn entertainment center, unfortunately it's becoming that first and foremost. Having
Re:Why is this government-controlled? (Score:3, Insightful)
funny how the idiots try and call others idiot when they makes themselves look like FOOLS.
if you would have actually read my entire post and made a educated and though out decision before you posted you would have seen that I never EVER said that porn is evil. I firmly do believe that porn needs to be handled differently.
Many people like you scream that it's opression... well is it opression that they don't place the playboy magazines next to the childrens magazines at the store? how dare they not put the porn videos out with the rest of the other videos! Debbie does dallas belongs on the same shelf as dumbo!
Porn needs to be put in the
so? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Or better yet, goatsex?
What are they going to do then? I didn't link anywhere and someone else in kids.us could link to me...
for those who read... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:for those who read... (Score:5, Insightful)
If this is indeed the case, how long before this domain is as impossible to oversee or manage as the rest of the Internet is today? I see scalability issues. You can always enforce the requirement of no outside links by supplementing the system with software, but moderating the contents? Good luck.
Re:so? (Score:2)
So now, are you .kids? If so your URL will be de-listed, since you are doing the illegal outside linking. If not then they couldn't link to you anyway. Either way someone would get delisted for outside linking or hosting inappropriate content.
Of course this raises the question: what is inappropriate content?
Re:so? (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course this raises the question: what is inappropriate content?
I'm pretty sure that goatse would be classed slightly inappropriate for small children. I mean, christ I'm over 30 and I found it traumatic enough to add an entry pointing goatse.cx->127.0.0.1 on my nameserver!
Re:so? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:so? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get it. Why is this society so obsessed with the concept that children are some sort of retarded subhuman species?
I grew up with intelligent parents that cared. I was never denied any soure of information, regardless of how ridiculous and/or "innapropriate", but was taught to use my brain to discard garbage on my own.
My children will get the same opportunity.
I've grown up to be a responsible, sane adult who isn't mind-controled by the media. Obviously, being able to use one's own jugment to qualify what's out there is not a desired objective of the governments.
They'd much rather have drones who consume the information that was deemed good for them without question.
-- MG
Re:so? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's my point! Why the hell not?
For one, most 8 year olds will, when faced with typical porn, go either "Ewww" or laugh out; but if they understand the basic idea of sexuality will understand what it's all about and just not be interrested in such imagery.
I can assure you that if some kid is digging for stuff on Harry Potter, and stumbles on some porn site, he'll just do like most of us and curse at the stupidity of not finding what he's after.
Unless, of course, you want to pretend that sex doesn't exist to your kids until it's much too late. Or perhaps you prefer to think that all humans are asexuate drones until some arbitary age?
Your kids will learn about sex. They will get access to imagery and texts. They will experiment amongst themselves.
Would you rather they understood nothing and be unprepared to make critical and moral judgement on their own?
I knew what sex was, and how it worked, and why people were so interrested in it young enough that I can't possibly remember being told specifically. That made me an accepting adult who is not completely fscked up with what is arguably the principal function of a living being.
While I don't particularly enjoy porn myself, I understand many do, and cannot think of single reason why that would be "bad" in any way.
My kids will be taught that some people like to be entertained by watching depictions of monsters horribly mutilating stupid teenagers, some by depicions of crime fighters doing impossible stunts to defeat the nefarious nemesis, and some by depictions of sexual activity both mundane and off-the-wall. All of them carfuly scripted (for the high quality stuff) fiction.
They'll get to decide which (if any) they enjoy for themselves.
-- MG
Bad solution. (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, this will probably end up in a flurry of anti-cybersquatting legislation, as companies vie with individuals to grab all of the good names in the new subdivision.
All in all, the wrong idea.
Good solution (Score:5, Interesting)
No it wouldn't. That wouldn't be at all useful. Sure, you couldn't block children from going there, but you can't force everything non "kid-safe" into that one corner. This way, you can have an inclusion only filter, which is always easier to set up. I don't see a few "redundant" registrations as being a problem, they don't exactly eat up a noticible amount of money or Internet resources.
Re:Bad solution. (Score:5, Funny)
I propose we call it .com
Re:Bad solution. (Score:2)
Re:Bad solution. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bad solution. (Score:3, Informative)
No, .ca is Canada.
And there are subdomains: .bc.ca refers to British Columbia, Canada.
If I recall correctly, .ca is also a subdomain for .us - Meaning .ca.us would refer to california, USA. I don't think california has a TLD at all.
Re:Bad solution. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bad solution. (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason for the creation of a
Re:Bad solution. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hear hear!
Like cities, the Internet is a "place" that was created BY adults FOR adults. As such it contains hazardous-to-kids analogs of traffic, industrial plants, political battlegrounds, pickup bars, red-light districts, casinos, marketplaces for dangerous items, and other attractive nuisances. Indeed, these produce much of its value and utility.
If a child is not mature enough to be allowed unescorted in the seamier neighborhoods of your local downtown, that kid is also not mature enough to be unsecorted on the internet. And trying to childproof the entirety of the internet (or all but a reserved area) is just as futile, damaging, and illegal as trying to childproof the entirety of adult society.
Creating an explicit childproof fenced-in playground, on the other hand, is just fine. With one possible exception...
I hope that either the prohibition on linking out of kids.us is relaxed to allow linking to kids. of any country that sets up a similar domain with compatable rules, or (perhaps better) that sites in other countries that are willing to abide by the US rules are allowed to register in kids.us.
This is just a whitelist (Score:4, Interesting)
Works out the same, but eliminates the cost of the domain to the website owner.
Re:This is just a whitelist (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is just a whitelist (Score:2)
Re:This is just a whitelist (Score:5, Funny)
Works out the same, but eliminates the cost of the domain to the website owner.
Well, the computational complexity of your solution is O(n) in space, whereas Bush's solution is O(1) space.
Looks like George W. Bush is a better software engineer than you are!
-- p
uh, gee (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, i'm just being cynical, i guess that is a pretty good idea.. a kid-safe playground that you can let your children run free on without any worry they'll run across anything "bad". I'm liking this idea the more i think about it, but i'm worried about what happens when they start deciding what is and isn't "kid-safe".. for example, what happens the first time someone puts something that really isn't kid-appropriate up on kids.us.. or what happens the first time that someone attempts to claim that something like, say, the web page for that Nickelodeon special about kids who have gay parents, and the intolerance they face (you know, the one that all the child psychologists lauded and all the religious groups tried to have nickelodeon boycotted for) declared "unsafe for kids.us"...
I wonder if the fact that actual laws have to be passed to introduce any changes in the administration of the
Re:uh, gee (Score:2)
Nothing at all.
Re:uh, gee (Score:3, Insightful)
Kids-safe news? I wish it were possible...
Re:uh, gee (Score:3, Insightful)
spam.kids.us? ads are off site links too (Score:3, Interesting)
i would think the news would be a mess to run because they sometimes include links. it would end up being a whole new site, so i guess they could "tone it down". i guess i should have looked to see what the target age group is before overpondering.
maybe it's more thought out.. but in general it seems like a major headache.... though maybe a good idea. talking to some parents i have noticed how darn scared they are about letting their kids online (even early teenagers).....
i could see people liking it if there is someplace you could let your 6 year old romp with no fears of pr0n, or them signing up for credit cards or something.
Well (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well (Score:2, Insightful)
That is, no child will get really harmed just by accidentally browsing to a page that contains "adult" content. They may get scared because of the reaction of their parents ("what the FUCK are you doing browsing those dirty sites"), or perhaps they've already been messed by zealous parents. But normal human being want be harmed by web pages, especially since it's easy to just close the browser.
I just have never understood the special american complex towards nudity or erotic material. And although I despise violence in all its forms, I don't think it's worth censoring either.
Re:Well (Score:3, Funny)
You obviously haven't been to any porn sites
Now taking bets.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Now taking bets.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm imagining there won't be much of a take up on it and it will die off after a bit (probably after the next election).
No international links (Score:5, Interesting)
Well hopefully the librarians at schools will keep at least one or two computers available for doing real research on sites like BBC, etc. who may not feel the need to create a special US version of their material available just for kids in the US.
Hopefully... (Score:2)
And equally as hopefully, our libraries will have access to more than just the
-Zipwow
Hopefully librarians. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
I recommend "Farenheit 451", "Lies my Teacher Told Me" and "Welcome to the Monkey House" for starters.
Indeed, any librarian who isn't doint this isn't a libraian at all, just a book filing clerk, and should find some other line of work.
KFG
Re:No international links (Score:3, Interesting)
.ca.... (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.ca/ [www.ca]
Hey, I have an idea! (Score:2, Insightful)
Christ - the problem of protecting children from offensive or adult content lies with the parents, not one some new-fangled US legislation. Educate your children, monitor their internet usage, but for goodness sakes, do NOT lock them into a pisspoor subset of the internet - a new domain suffix is NOT a suitable substitute for responsible adult supervision.
Re:Hey, I have an idea! (Score:5, Insightful)
Now most (but not all) parents will be able to trust the kids.us filter _as a baseline_. If they want their kids to see additional stuff they are always empowered to do so, and the time required to do that is managable.
Where this won't work well is for some parents who find some of the accepted kids.us content unacceptable. (And to be honest, I'm not all that worried about them.)
MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hey, I have an idea! (Score:3, Interesting)
I know this would make the domain system even more complicated, but it could prove useful.
Re:Hey, I have an idea! (Score:5, Insightful)
For the most part, I agree with you, but then, most of society doesn't. I have two children and one is old enough to use our computer, and I monitor her Internet usage. In fact, I have raised my daughter in such a way that she self-censors. She knows when she's stumbled across something that may be questionable and asks me if it's okay. However, not everyone is as good a parent as I am (sorry to sound snotty, but it's the truth.) Consider how this will inevitably boomerang back on our asses if we don't provide a safe "sandbox" for the rest of the parents out there who can't get it together. I don't want to see legislation that attempts to outlaw content and punish people for viewing certain things because some inattentive parent out there can't get the first clue on how to raise their child. I'd much rather accept this "lesser evil."
I'm surprised to see any carping about it as any attempts to make the Internet more kid-friendly without legislation would seem to find favor with most readers of Slashdot.
Ban advertising too (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ban advertising too (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ban advertising too (Score:4, Insightful)
What difference does that make? (Score:4, Insightful)
AFAIK there is nothing to stop Pokimon from having a pokimon.kids.us website which can be linked to from advertisments within the kids.us domain.
As far as I am concerned, Pokimon is a cynical manipulation of children for profit. Marketing to children seeks to brainwash them into thinking that happiness is having the latest Nike trainers and drinking Pepsi.
Looking at countries like the US, and the frequency with which I hear the words "I want" whenever I am around American kids - I guess it is working beautifully.
Re:Ban advertising too (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OK so far (Score:5, Informative)
It's a good and oft-ignored point -- censorship (or, more accurately, attempted legislation of consumption behavior) isn't a Left/Liberal-Right/Conservative issue. There are plenty of folks on both sides who'd love to prevent potentially "offensive" material from being sold in stores.
There's more on the differences between the "Left/Right" axis and the "Libertarian/Authoritarian" axis here:
http://www.digitalronin.f2s.com/politicalcompass/
Or, if you want to take the test first and see where you stand:
http://www.digitalronin.f2s.com/politicalcompass/
This is a "good thing"... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just by the fact that the name is "kids.us" I don't think this is something that is targetting more general audiences such as those accessing the internet in public libraries.
Re:This is a "good thing"... (Score:3, Insightful)
I once heard about an ongoing project of finding paths through the web. The objective was to take any web site and within seven clicks on links arrive at a porn site. Last I heard, the government of New Zealand web site was the only one for which they hadn't succeeded. Adjusting the content (removing links that aren't on the whitelist, to satisfy the link requirement) of a web site based on which TLD the domain was requested as isn't terribly difficult to do, but will the adoption of this be so widespread as to warrant very many sites doing it? In my opinion, no. I like the idea of a non-kid friendly TLD much better; at that point filtering in large part becomes trivial.
Another thing, how does the government determine what material is acceptible for children? Obviously some things are right out, but what about for instance a Tom and Jerry cartoon with animated violence? How much is too much? What about the purists that say "I'd rather have my child watch two people making love than two people trying to kill each other"? The definition of 'acceptable' varies widely from parent to parent, culture to culture, and I don't think you can appease them all at once, not by a long way. Better to organize things into catagories such as ".xxx" and let parents figure out what they want their kids to see.
I think *you're* missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of the posts I've read seem to miss the point...No one is going to pretend that the kids have access to the 'net at large -- that's not what they want. They just want a guaranteed 'safe' way to expose their kids to some educational resources.
Now, I think that you're the one missing the point of the others. Yes, I think we all understand that this isn't meant to be an ideal solution but I would argue that it's not a solution at all. Worse, it's a non-solution pretending to be a solution. I would argue there is no "guaranteed safe way" to provide information to children since there will never be a concensus on what is "safe". Invariably there will be some stuff on kids.us that someone will decide is inappropriate and we'll be right back where we started from. I think it's best to force parents to realize that there will never be a "guaranteed safe" way to surf the web and not to use this kids.us to give them a warm, fuzzy feeling.
You have to realize that a lot of us here also get goosebumps whenever the government is given the job of "approving" any information source, even if it's in the name of the children. The whole idea of government-approved information sources (consciously or not) stirs up bad images of communist and totalitarian regimes.
GMD
Re:I think *you're* missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
I would argue there is no "guaranteed safe way" to provide information to children since there will never be a concensus on what is "safe".
Come down out of your ivory tower and take a look at the real world -- it's messy, has no problems that have 100% perfect solutions, is mostly run by boneheads who make compromises based on tradeoffs about things they don't understand -- and it works pretty well anyway, by and large.
Who *cares* if the kids.us solution isn't 100% perfect? What is? Sure there will be some controversy and some argument about what is and is not "safe", but the result will be content that 95% of the population agrees is just fine for their kids, or at least not too bad. That's compared to about 0.001% of the population that currently believes the same statement about the Internet.
It doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.
Where's Geoffrey? (Score:4, Funny)
What about IP addresses? (Score:2, Interesting)
It might make it easier to filter, but still far from easy. And any kid that knows how to use nslookup (oh, sorry - that's been depricated. Of course I meant dig) can bypass it.
What are you talking about? (Score:2)
Virtual servers has nothing to do with it.. this has specifically to do with WEBSITES.
If your site is referenced by a
That's pretty damn simple.
What do you mean, *MIGHT* make it easier to filter? You take your web proxy at your elementary school library, you say "don't resolve anything besides
It's dead easy to force the proxy to only pass urls ending in kids.us (which means raw IP address urls would be blocked)
Better be quick.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Better be quick.. (Score:4, Funny)
Maj. Kong
So... (Score:2, Insightful)
So, who'll do it? What happens if a kid is doing a report on, say, Djbouti, but Encyclopedia Onlineica didn't believe it would be cost effective to go through the effort?
Speaking of that, who decides what content of Encyclopedia Onlineica is safe? After all, everyone knows that the *good* encyclopedias have lengthy sections detailing how and why humans rock the casbah.
Man, that was sad. I used to read volume S quite a bit. *sigh*
Pathetic events of my childhood aside, how effective is this going to be? Is this just the feel-good I'm-not-bombing-anyone-right-now event of the political season, or will this actually work?
I guess it boils down to - will Little Johnny still be able to get the information he needs for school work without being bombarded by porn pop-ups, or will he just say, "Screw it!" and use the 'regular' 'net?
More work to be done. (Score:2)
I don't remeber anyone complaing at the birth of the internet that
Message Boards (Score:5, Insightful)
Overall though I think it is a good idea. Assuming websites targetted at children, (such as Disney, schools, and knowledge databases), take advantage of this it could be very beneficial. I think many of those who could take advantage of this will have to create dual sites: one for the domain and one for outside of it, as many schools and knowledge databases benefit from refrencing information that will not be in the domain.
Search Engines (Score:3, Funny)
Next up... [.parents.us] (Score:4, Funny)
Washington Boast
Wednesday, December 4th, 2002; 12:30PM
President Bush today signed legislation that seals off the P-rated (Parents Only) "neighborhood" for parents on the World Wide Web.
The Dot-parents implementation will contain items that kids may not look at. All content that is suitable for viewing after kids go to bed will be available at .parents.us sites.
These sites will only be available after 10PM in most time zones, except for CST (which will have it available after 9PM).
Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), remarked that the new domain was just what his doctor ordered. Sen. Dorgan says "We're not censoring anything. We're just making it available after 10PM for parents only."
How on earth is this going to work?? (Score:5, Insightful)
And also how the hell are they going to to stop the pedo's abusing this. Domain name and IP spoofing as well as email and the rest could lead to a situation no one wants to see.
The answer is not ham fisted attempts such as this one, its parental supervision. I know that my son is not allowed to go on the computer unless there is an adult present.
Re:How on earth is this going to work?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe they can offer a contract to Google [google.com] to spider the whole domain, but in addition offering a kids friendly search engine [google.kids.us], Google could also do the cross checks by having the special bots that spider it also check all the links for anything that isn't kids.us, lock those out of the kids.us search engine database, and report them to the appropriate agency handling it. When a link is found that goes to a non-kids.us site, the domain owner is called up by that agency (their emergency contact info might be part of the registration requirement) and told to remove it within the hour, or their domain name gets disabled (which could be done faster if the kids.us zone file has short TTL settings on all the delegations). Since the technology exists to isolate the upper level domain names, such as Slashdot uses to optionally show them to you in postings, it could easily be extended to totally block out the link if it's not to kids.us, or even reject the posting altogether. The problem is more a social one of making people actually do it since way too many people (adults here) are too clueless to understand how to make things right. So we shouldn't be seeing a goatse.cx or urinalpoop.org showing up if they do it right.
There are lots of different kinds of spoofing, so I don't know which you are referring to, so I can't give a specific example of how to prevent it. But the obvious part is that there are at least 2 levels of protection parents can engage. The light level is simply make sure the kids start on a kids.us portal. Then as long as the site operators do what they are supposed to, the kids will be safe. The stronger level is to configure the browser so that when the kids are logged in to the computer, it won't allow access to any web content (including images, Java, CSS, whatever) which isn't found by means of a kids.us domain lookup. So the URLs with IP addresses won't work, either.
One form of spoofing you may be referring to is stuff like emailed URLs that look like a kids.us URL, but in fact go to somewhere else. But that's an issue of whether the parents allow the kids to use software that would access some other domain. By using the stronger level of protection, even opening spam with these links will fail, as long as the program displaying it goes through the same mechanisms to find the site (which I believe is the case on Windows). The content actually in that mail is another issue. Since almost everything in email can be forged, you might not want to allow your kids access to email unless you have some stronger protection to ensure they are getting it only from other kids you approve of. Restricting kids to web based email on a kids.us webmail site, that by extension of the law should only communicate with other such sites and not to any outside of the kids.us domain, and not by SMTP which could spoof that, should keep your kids safe.
I don't believe the law is requiring you as a parent to restrict your kids to this domain, but rather, is giving you this as an option, so that if you choose to, you can set up the computer to limit itself to kids.us and actually leave your child unattended for a while at the computer with more confidence than you would have today. My worry, though, is that this might be just the first step to more laws, or case law, in the future. Consider a court deciding to take children away from their parents and the fact that the parents didn't restrict their kids to kids.us on the computer was what tipped the scale in the case. That would open up a whole lot of new problems that I can see. And I'm afraid a case like that will happen within a few years.
Re:How on earth is this going to work?? (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right -- technical solutions shouldn't be a substitute for good parenting and supervision. But a little bit of technical wizardry does help. You do keep the cookie jar out of their reach, right?
As for how it's going to be enforced, it's the responsibility of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration [doc.gov] according to the HR Bill [loc.gov].
is this a stupid question? (Score:5, Insightful)
can these sites explain mommy's breast cancer?
can these sites explain mommy's breast enhancements?
can these sites explain daddy's breast enhancements?
where's that arbitrary line drawn?
Re:is this a stupid question? (Score:5, Insightful)
There'll also be those that think the line is drawn to wide, like those that think the teletubbies are a subversive plot to make children gay.
Let them play, let them have fun, for fuck sakes. I really wish people would stop using them as pawns to push their own philosophical agendas.
We expect them to understand the world as we do at the ripe old ages of 6 or 7.
The cruelest thing we do in this day and age is rob kids of their childhood. It makes me sick.
Oh the sanctimonious holier than thou hath spoken. (Score:3, Insightful)
My niece who is 5 years old asked me yesterday why those two gentlemen in the train were kissing.
Now, oh wise one, guardian of the moral rectitude and the correct free speech, tell me how do we hide the real world [tm] from children without somehow explaining it (in the kindergarten, the train or at home).
Finally! My 800th post, and Amazingly Insightful! (Score:5, Funny)
Bar and George must be very proud.
Mods - please don't mod this up, Dubya can only count to 3.
This is *GREAT*. (Score:4, Insightful)
1) It does not seek to regulate the whole internet.
2) The domain is
3) Those who RUN kids.us set the rules for using that domain. The fact that it's a presidential order does not make it bad.... I could say the same thing about my domain, and set whatever terms I *WANT* for you to hafve a subdomain, and I am the law.
THis is the RIGHT approach to the problem.
How will this work? (Score:2, Insightful)
By linking, are they referring to hyperlinks, or any sort of reference to sites outside .kids.us? What if you want to have graphics on your site from another (primary) site on an outside domain? Is all access to domains outside .kids.us going to be blocked? Is this technically possible? What about pop-ups? Will Java also be banned? Who is going to be in charge of the domain, and hence selling it? I'm sure someone like McDonalds, Disney, or Mattel would kindly volunteer...
Sorry, but it just seems like this hasn't been thought through terribly well.
Certifying Sites for .kids (Score:4, Insightful)
In my opinion, all you have to do is check that the content of all of these sites is kid-safe. That's going to require periodic human checks anyway. However, there's nothing to stop them from putting up links to non-kids sites, like this [teletubbies.com] one.
The real bonus of the
That way, if you have an adult surfing, they can actually follow links to relevant
Great, now just another domain everyone will need. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great, now just another domain everyone will ne (Score:3, Informative)
I weep for John Q. Porn indeed.
What's the problem here, exactly ?
That You can't draw attention from the kid-safe domains ? Oh how horrible indeed.
Here's an idea.. You could setup a kid-safe site, apply, and get in.
You can't use google ? shoot.. how horrible..
I guess You're imagining that kids.us won't have an internal search engine then ?
After all, all the kids should be able to find the information they want just by clicking all over the place ? Nuh-uh.
And why indeed would You want to link to CNN headlines ??
"Dominatrix pleads not guilty to murder charge"
Oh yes, I'm sure kids.us will want to explain that one to the kids
How about linking to cnn.kids.us
or just
news.kids.us
kid-safe news for the kid-safe domain.
Here in The Netherlands, we have a special news broadcast called "Jeugdjournaal", it's for kids from age 6-14 or something.
It presents all the news that is 'fit' for kids (i.e. no dominatrices) in a kid-safe kind of way.
This broadcast is also government run, and I haven't seen any specific bias.
They've reported on just about everything the regular news has, just brings it in a more light-hearted tone.
For example, they'll happily tell kids that Israelis shot dead Palestine kids who were throwing rocks at soldiers.
But they won't show the blood and gore that's smeared all over the streets and bodybads being carried away.
They also explain -why- the kids were throwing rocks, and why the Israeli's opened fire on them.
Totally objective.. the kids can make up their own mind on whether the Israeli's were okay on opening fire and killing them.
That's the only really scary thing that You might wonder about with kids.us - the -way- information is presented. Not -what- information per se.
That makes 6cts now...
Slashdot.Kids.Us (Score:2, Funny)
Site News: Kids, when you submit news stories remember to link only within .kids.us and to not say anything unpatriotic or the trained mammals will bite your fingers until you behave.
Another sign of the US becoming a Police State (Score:2)
This police state controls only a little part of us, even if it is the little kids. But restricting kids to the underage section well... I don't see how this will be helpful in any case.
They should start with pushing pay-for-porn or banner-filled porn sights to an
Looks good to me (Score:4, Interesting)
The idea here is obviously to create a domain that kids can use unsupervised, so you would limit their machines to that domain by use of a proxy of some description. If they need access to things outside that domain, they can do so under supervision
Inability to access other content is unlikely to be a problem anyway, since it's not merely a question of whether content is suitable for kids, but whether it is targetted to kids. Pre-teen kids aren't usually much interested in content that's not designed for kids anyway.
If the content is targetted to kids, the domain owner is likely to register under that domain anyway.
The only thing I'd like to have seen is that it be .kids, rather than .kids.us, but I guess the limitation to .us is for political reasons - surprisingly, for Bush, in an effort not to appear to be acting as the President of the World.
What about email servers on the .kid.us domain? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, a new venture as a non-free (say $5-$10 a month) email service might be a good idea. As an ISP, all you would have to do is report spammers to the USG.
Easy Filtering (Score:5, Funny)
I got modded down 'cause I was against this! (Score:3, Interesting)
Overly technical legislation (Score:3, Interesting)
In the same way, there are plenty of ways to 'link' to a site. Does this only restrict A HREF? How about setting window.location in Javascript? Or I could make a dummy form and use buttons for links. What if I put in the URL of a porn site but don't make the link clickable? What if I just mention a web site's name, as in "I bought it on the eBay site?" Also, if I own a
.kids.us is an awful idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Specific metadata needs to be available for content which can then be filtered by policy. There's already a well defined system in place to support this: ICRA (formerly RSACi). A simple tag on each web page (or just the root for the site) tells what content the page or site contains. It can then be left up to parents to set access permissions, like no viewing of nudity except in an artistic context, or no graphic violence.
Labeling can't be mandated directly, but here's an easy way to make ICRA universal:
1. Give tax incentives to businesses that use ICRA labels, and make it a crime to misrepresent a site by placing incorrect ICRA labels in pages. There wouldn't be any legal suits (at least any with merit) over page misrepresentation as ICRA tags describe in very concrete terms what a page contains (e.g. full frontal nudity, descriptions of drug use, etc...) rather than value judgements (e.g. kid safe).
2. Wait until ICRA becomes mainstream, then ship browsers that default to blocking sites that don't rate themselves.
3. Remove the tax incentives.
Unlike creating a new
I'm not saying anything new here. This has been around for a long time.
Few problems. (Score:3, Insightful)
While I think that creating a dot kids domain isn't necessarily a bad thing, there may be a few problems.
The first, and perhaps most obvious problem is classifying something as "kids safe" or "not kids safe". "kids" is a very broad definition. I mean, would you seriously apply the same standards to a 16 year old as you would an 8 year old? Some things (like goatse) are obviously "not kids safe", and some things are obviously "kids safe". Unfortunately, probably 90% of websites are in the grey area.
It really depends on an individual view-point. Some people [capalert.com] would consider even the most mild things offensive, and some wouldn't. All it takes is one single curse word on some page of a site(more or less), and the site potentially could fall into the grey area between "kids safe" and "not kids safe".
Sites with some dynamic interactive content(i.e. forums, comment boards, guestbooks, etc...) would be automatically in the grey area, since who knows what could appear there, although they are forbidden by the bill anyway.
But what will the standards be? Even if they are relatively simple, you run into all sorts of problems. For example, say the only rule is "no porn". Okay, how do you really define porn? Thats a very broad definition. As I said before, some thing are definitely porn, and some are not, but many are in between. Okay, say you make the rule simpler. No nudity. Well, even thats a bit broader, and could have many problems. So you define exactly what is meant by nudity. Well, then you run into the problem that nudity alone is not harmful. You could have pornographic pictures that do not meet the definition of nudity. Okay, so no pictures with nudity or sexual acts/references. By the time you're done with a good definition, you've already excluded most of the websites on the internet. In fact, I can't think of a single website I frequently visit that wouldn't fail a test like that.
There probably won't be many useful sites there at all.
Secondly, back to the issue with age groups. Saying absolutely no possibly offensive material is okay for little kids, but what about teenagers. I remember having to do a school report about the Holocaust, and I think many people would consider sites about the Holocaust unsafe for little kids. I also had to do several reports dealing with science/medicine. Even a relatively simple no-nudity rule has problems then. Remember that the WHOLE site has to be "kids safe". Many medical sites have nudity somewhere to some degree.
Although its not 100% related, I think I should also bring up the idea of creating a
Anyways, back to the
Oh well, at least its not a mandatory
Re:It's been said before... (Score:5, Funny)
There is a very good reason. They want to look at porn.
Tim
great idea (not) (Score:2)
Re:which kids? (Score:2, Funny)
I'm still waiting on the
Like this (Score:5, Informative)
That was linked from nic.us.. it's the page for the kids.us domain. Apparently Neustar is still holding a public comment period asking for advice on how to run the thing.. apparently they didn't really want to create this domain and don't have any idea how to go about doing the thing, so they seem to be hoping on letting "the community" come up with ideas.
The public comment period isn't over yet, though, so it *looks* like you can't get one yet.. on the other hand, as an interested party (i.e. an individual with a kids-specific site) this would probably be a great opportunity for you to make your voice heard..
Re:Community thinks? (Score:2)
I would guess that they'd be all for it. It's an exclusive area for kids to go to, instead of forcing every site in the world to comply with a capability to effectively filter them.
Sites volunteer to provide content for that TLD, so they don't necessarily have to use a
It's probably the fairest way to deal with this problem. It doesn't rock anybody else's boat.
Re:Community thinks? (Score:2, Insightful)
Although I think that it would be much better to go the other way around... allow parents to censor for their children by requiring that potentially offensive material have a domain like .adult. Censored only by the choice of that particular subscriber.
Re:Community thinks? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem here is what is considered "offensive".
Things like The Bible, factual information about sex, contraception, diseases and the like have routinely been blocked by various censorware programs. Would these all be offensive?
To somebody, sure. To most rational people? No.
The idea of a "safe zone" is really the only one consistent with allowing for differing opinions.
Now, since there are people out there who are offended by just about everything, I expect to see them bitching about most of the things in the new domain and getting them taken down, but that's a different topic.