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House OKs Wiretapping and New .kids.us domain
proj_2501 writes: "Yahoo! has a story about how the US House of Representatives has overwhelmingly approved two new bills: one for the creation of a federally overseen TLD called .kids.us (participation is voluntary), and the other for more ease of wiretapping to supposedly prevent dangerous meetings between kids and 'child predators'." Remember, an equivalent bill has not yet been introduced in the Senate.
Why do they persist in eroding my rights in order to keep me "safe"?
Every time they decide we need protecting, they strip away yet another preciously gained right. Once they're gone, good luck getting them back.
I propose a new form of energy. We can harness the power of the founding fathers spinning in their graves. Given what's going on these days, we should be able to replace Three Mile Island. The only problem is that we need Sen. Hollings around to craft more legislation.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
I don't get it: how is this legislation going to prevent children from chatting online with child molestors?
.kids.us will just be another dead area on the Internet, and that kids will find it boring (aka - no chatting) and return to the same areas they were surfing before.
Seems to me that this new
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
the .kids doesnt strike me as all that bad, its a good way to help keep kids off sites they really dont need to visit, without censoring the rest of the net
.kids thing
Wiretapping is crap, but, i dont mind the
think about it
Microsoft IIS is to webserving as KFC is to healthy eating
"it should reduce the chance of accidental exposure to pornography and to other Web sites considered harmful to children"
Who has the authority to decide what's harmful and what isn't?
I mean, some things are blatantly obvious, but where is the line drawn? How much does a site have to overstep bounds before they can go after it?
`"I have repeatedly said that libraries have children's book sections, why can't the Internet have the same type of section devoted to children's interests?" he said.'
What team are we going to have on the payroll to monitor an entire TLD?
And how long until it gets unmanageable and degenerates into nothing better than the rest of them?
A good idea, but trying to manage content seems like it would get out of hand quickly.
Teenagers are sexual. Online teenagers from 13 upwards are very sexual with each other. How is any form of wiretapping meant to tell who is a teenager and who isn't, and what is normal sexual activity and what is not?
The internet is a dynamic which few of law-passing age understand.
This is like those local governments that think you need a separate law to cover driving while yapping on a cell phone. Isn't wreckless driving, or driving while distracted enough? Why does our government, and our lawyers, and courts lack so much common sense??
Now with this regulation, the internet will finally become the safe haven for children that it should have been a millenia ago. Those useless existing laws for punishing molesters and pedophiles should be punished by joining the ranks of all those other laws that sit gathering dust while our most benevolent and intelligent government cooks up new ones that in essence do nothing new. Hey, I think I wanna tune my radio! Nahhh, lets just buy an entire new entertainment system that already has the channel I want tunned in. I am so glad that our logical government ignores foolish things like 'history' and 'past performance' so that they can give us these new laws that only address one particular means of child/sicko meeting while giving us that false sense of security that 'everything is taken care of'.
On an unrelated note, I hear the Senate has officially approved the 'Soma Reformation Act' which will allow us to take part in the chemical utopia brought forth by our caring and responsible government officials. Taxes got you down? Had your property illegally siezed in the name of 'the children'? Just pop some Soma and it will seem A. O. K.!
To which we all heartily agree, but the article claims:
Say what? That looks like the existing "put a token filtering system in place, then abrogate your responsibility" method so beloved of AOL and the NetNanny brigade. But did our elected representatives just mandate that and slip through mandatory domain locking in browsers while nobody was looking? Let's check the actual bill, H.R. 3833
Hmm, OK, not too bad. Once you're in, you can't just click out by accident (although of course this will happen, but at least they've thought about it). Is that all?
OK, much as I hate catch-all clauses, this is still limited to "the new domain", not to enforcing functionality in browsers (or telnet, for that matter) to lock off the domain. It looks like any browser locking functionality will be voluntary and third party. I can see AOL and Microsoft scrambling to implement this ASAP, but nobody will have to.
I'm always ready to believe the worst of our legislators when it comes to dealing with technology (their track record isn't great), but I think they've got this one right (even if they are a little vague on how it will actually be administrated). I pronounce this bill sane and measured
Regarding H.R. 1877, it's largely moot. It's a minor modification to existing wiretap law, and law enforcement (or anyone with a suit and a badge and some lawyers) can get a wiretap on you right now for pretty much any reason they like. Personally I think that soliciting children for sex should justify a wiretap, and I'm all in favour of honesty in law enforcement, rather than making them scam a warrant for un-American activities (aka domestic terrorism) or whatever.
Constant vigilance is a good thing, but I don't see anything scary or particularly bad in either of these bills. OK, I find the thought of a .kids.us full of Disney and Barney a little scary, but that's not really the fault of Congress. ;-)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The vast majority of websites are kid-friendly, or at least kid-neutral. To confine kids to a kids only domain of approved sites limits their creativity and access immesurably.
Case in point: Last year, my son was 9. Calls me up at work one day, and says "Dad, I have a science project coming up." The little dude had gone online, and researched plans for building a very simple, leafblower powered, one man hovercraft. Some guy in WhoKnowsWhere, Iowa had built one, and put the design online. So my son made some mods, wrote a "how and why", we built it, he won first place. If restricted to 'kids.us', he probably would never have come across this.
Is every website operator supposed to submit their site for inclusion into the kids domain? Not a chance. There is a wealth of kid usable info from various sources such as hobbyists, colleges, clubs, that would not normally think of themselves as 'kid-friendly'. All these would be shut out from kids access.
Instead, they will be tooling around in disney.kids.us, nickjr.kids.us, and toysrus.kids.us. Utterly devoid of anything but another sales opportunity, and some games.
And while we're at it, WTF is with this "kids.us"? Are American children the only ones deserving of 'protection'?
Who will be doing the approving? Are their thoughts about 'kid friendly' the same as mine? Not a chance.
I'm sure everyone is going to lambaste this idea, but I find nothing wrong with it. It is completely voluntary. It basically creates a subset of internet sites parents will know for sure are safe for their children. It is the equivalent to the children's section of the library. Everything in that section is "safe" for kids, but there is no rule saying kids cannot go into the adult section. Same thing here. The .kids.us section will be safe for kids, but they can still go into the "adult" section of the net. It basically helps parents do their job of parenting and watching their kids. Put a simple filter that only allows .kids.us sites through, and if the kid wants to see the "adult" side of the net, the parent can let him and decide what they can and can't see.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Why does our government, and our lawyers, and courts lack so much common sense??
Considering that with each such law we end up with less freedom while they end up with more power, while we keep re-electing them, one has to wonder who is the one that really lacks common sense. Or any sense at all.
Say you're in a shopping mall and some teen keeps tripping on escalators and bumping at your feet. With each 'accident' the partner of the 'inept' teen takes something out of your pockets. Would you call the falling teen an uncoordinated fool, knowing that after each fall you end up with less money?
Now, this would be the same as calling the big swindlers in Washington and New York inept fools, just because their outward rationales for their decisions don't make much sense -- their actions and means chosen seem always out of sync with the stated noble goals.
But when you observe the seemingly unintended side effects of those decisions, you realize that these rationales and noble goals are mere distractions, just like the fall of the 'inept' teen, so the truly intended purposes can unnoticably unfold while we tangle in their verbal smokescreen.
Look at all the molestation cases out there. The one common thread among them is that the children were stupid enough to give out contact information and talk to people they shouldn't be. Instead of filtering the entire Web into the "buy more toys/cereal/video games/other stuff" .kids.us domain, parents should teach their children what's really going on out there.
It's time to stop sugar-coating reality for the kiddies. Tell 'em about real life early on, and they'll be more wary. They'll also be able to deal with all the information available on the web in the appropriate manner. Kids aren't as stupid as people like to think.
Sure, sites could be mirrored or you could do tricks in your Apache .conf file to make the same site answer to .kids.us, but actual content would have to be modified. For example, a NASA page couldn't link to a foreign space agency or even to an American university.
The new .kids.us domain isn't "bad" per se; it's just ill-thought-out (as usual for Congress when it comes to the Internet).
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Re, "The only purpose this new domain serves is to entice parents to let down their guard..."
Just like a playground. Many playgrounds, small parks intended just for children, were first established during the Progressive era about a hundred years ago to give children in densely populated cities a place to play besides the street.
You can still let your kids play in the street if you like, with you watching (or not). Or you can take them to the playground.
Using the internet with your supervision for a project -- Going downtown with you holding the child's hand, on your way to a specific event (shopping, public library, concert)
Surfing the net unsupervised -- Turning the child loose downtown (not necessarily a bad thing depending on the child and the part of town)
Limiting access to kids.us -- Taking the child to "Little Gym" or one of those indoor play parks, where you can leave them safely while you do something else.