Slashdot Mirror
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.
"Wiretapping" and "Won't someone think of the children!??"
This makes me ill.
nuff said.
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
An equivalent bill does not need to be introduced in the Senate. This House bill now gets placed on the Senate agenda for debate. No one needs to introduce an equivalent bill, it is done so automatically.
waaay too much said.
So do they have the same cool cloaking-ability as the adult predators?
So when I register sites like:
government.kids.us or
bush.kids.us
I'm actually saying that the government and Bush are fooling us?
Ha! Isn't always that kids understand technology before adults can - surely they only want to find out how to advance even faster from all the stuff these kids know :D
I can see it now... as if technology wasn't fast enough now... five year old kids get tapped discussing how to build nano-fibres - just don't tell the olds cos this will really freak them :)
Seriously though, just in case that is a bit off topic I would prefer my kids (assuming I had some) being watched over than have some sicko getting them!
My blog [.net, rants, general IT]
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
hi,
the article made me think of something about telephone wiretaps.
if me and my buddy each had a scrambling doodad that made my voice encrypted, and then on his end decrypted, how long do y'all figure it would be before someone showed up at my door asking what i was doing?
and do they make something like that? (thats just for the sake of interest)
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
I wish they would just hurry up and take away the rest of everyone's freedom. It's much easier to deal with all at once then to be slowly ate away at over time.
"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
I don't like the repurcussions of this if it passes. I forsee the government in the lead role of a favorite children's book of mine: "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie..."
wouldn't kids.us be a second-level domain to the tld .us ?
Adds an whole new meaning to underage pr0n!
Probably wouldn't if you both were inside the US. If one of you was in a different country, esp eastern europe, middle east, or east africa, I think they would be there within a few days...
Isn't it actually .kids.r.us? You know, to go along with .toys.r.us?
"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.
The domain measure, approved on a 406-2 vote, would have the federal government oversee a ".kids.us" domain on the Internet that would have only material appropriate for children under 13. ... Parents could set computer software to limit a child's access to only addresses ending in .kids.us.
Well, there goes the internet as an educational tool for children. The internet was almost like the answer to what the government thinks is appropriate for our kids.
So I'm sure we'll have buytoys.kids.us and gap.kids.us, but they either expect thousands of educational websites to grab a new TLD, or kids to look at nothing but cute online shopping wishlists. Or they don't care, but want to be seen doing something.
Squid or any other proxy software.
To Do: 1. Take over world 2. Pick up Milk and Bread on the way home
Wouldn't it be better called teens.us, per COPA? ;-)
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.
If the major sites for children start going I think all of them will have to go to .kids.us. For instance if Disney has a Disney.kids.us and they want to link to Nickelodeon's website the Nickelodeon website will have to be .kids.us else the child will not be able to view it (assuming that the parents only let the children view .kids.us). This will certainly require a lot of website updating as new companies and individuals take up the .kids.us.
One of the first things I teach my Unix sysadmin students is to get rid of the following alias that seems to be the default in so many Linux distros:
alias rm "rm -i"
Why? Because once they start depending upon this alias to do all the work for them by prompting for every file to be deleted, they'll be in for the surprise of their life when they end up on a machine that doesn't have rm set up to do their thinking for them.
So here we have kids.us -- a supposedly "safe haven" for parents to send their children on the net. Parents can now rest easy, knowing their responsibility towards monitoring their child's behavior has been alleviated by the thoughtfulness of Uncle Sam. Just like the example above, there's no need to keep track of your child on the net so long as they stick with kids.us sites, because the government is one step ahead, protecting their children by ensuring only kid-safe content is found on kids.us websites.
What a farce. The only purpose this new domain serves is to entice parents to let down their guard, making it easier to bombard children with supposedly "kid-safe" content, just like sysadmins who depend upon an aliased version of rm to absolve them of responsibility. We as humans always seem to be looking for someone else to shoulder our responsibilities. When will we begin to learn to take responsibility for our own actions?
House OKs CB Radio Protection for Kids
Wed May 22, 1:35 AM ET
By DENNIS MORAD, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Citing the recent death of a Connecticut child who apparently fell victim to a man she met using a Citizens Band (CB) Radio, the House voted overwhelmingly to establish a new channel for kid-friendly chat and to expand surveillance authority to target CB predators.
The channel measure, approved on a 406-2 vote, would have the federal government oversee a ".kids" channel on CBs that would have only material appropriate for children under 13. CB operators' participation would be voluntary. Parents could set CB radios to limit a child's access to only the kids channel.
"Sometimes I think the Citizens Band Radio should be renamed the Wicked Mans Radio," said Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich.
Supporters of the channel bill, sponsored by Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., say it should reduce the chance of accidental exposure to pornography and to other conversations considered harmful to children, and it would not provide any access to interactive features, such as the ability to talk back.
Groups opposing the domain, including the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites), have called the legislation a backdoor attempt at censorship.
Shimkus said parents need to be aware of what channels their children are scanning.
"I have repeatedly said that libraries have children's book sections, why can't CBs have the same type of section devoted to children's interests?" he said.
"The threat to our children is real," its chief sponsor, Rep. Nancy Johnson, R-Conn., said.
Rep. Robert Scott, D-Va., argued against expanding wiretap authority, voicing concerns that even current limited use by law enforcement typically results in overhearing innocent conversations.
"It ought to be necessary," he said of wiretapping authority. "It's not enough for it to be helpful for law enforcement."
A similar wiretapping bill passed the House last year but died in the Senate.
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??
Lameness filter encountered. Go here.
The kids.us designation is only as good as the DNS propagation.
Still, having sites designated as "kids only" and having restrictions in browsers (controlled by the parents/legal guardian to turn on/off).. you tell me what the "free speech" problem is in that.
Goes back to the on/offswitch argument with the V-Chip. I mean the power switch.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Only parents who are already paying attention to what their kids are doing on the Internet will filter based on the .kids.us TLD. The kids who really need some protection in this manner still won't get it because if the parents were paying attention, the kids wouldn't need it in the first place.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
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.!
Speaking of Second Level Domains (SLDs)... we haven't heard a peep out of New Net in quite some time. They too are selling second level domains. And, they even have a .kids SLD going. I think that the people who are buying these domains are morons. We should all set up an SLD so that every domain on the Net answers to "www.[insert name here].kids.tld".
...is politicians seeking to ensure that by the time they reach adulthood we will all be treated as children by the state.
Who is going to protect them? Only we can and only by taking responsibility for the government that we create. Politicians are chosen from among the people and it is the people who elect them. Be responsible by being active in the political arena and aware of what is going on. B.S. legislation exists largely because most people DON'T VOTE. Politicians know this, boy do they ever. You wouldn't believe the kinds of statistical research they have done to find out who their real constituents are. Why do you think politicians from both parties kiss the ass of the elderly? Because the elderly VOTE! We can bitch and moan about campaign finances and political corruption due to the influence of corporations, but at the end of the day it is still the citizens who do the electing.
The system can work for us or against us. Your choice.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
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.
Rather than having .kids.us, and then later .teens.us it would seem much more sensible to have .xxx, or .rude
Granted this would stand no chance of ever happening but it's a much more sensible approach - isn't it?
I am not even going to address the wiretapping, most slashdotter's already have the sense to know why more wiretapping is bad.
I think what seems really interesting here is that it is being done to protect children from online predators. It seems to me that in many cases wiretapping will probably only happen long after a predator is suspected, at which point the damage is likely already done; and that we would be better off going after these people with targeted sting operations of some sort, allowing officers posing as kids to get these people BEFORE they have a chance to hurt a child.
My wife is a teacher and is constantly butting heads over the net nanny software the school district installed (this from the same boobs that (a) repeatly assigned duplicate IPs (b) moved to Outlook, which keeps half the network down with viruses). This filtering stuff has interesting side effects--like no one being able to do web research on the planet Venus: Because it crops up in so many adult sites, it got added to the exclusion list!
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
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.
It is wrong and illegal to monitor the online activities of minors. Unless of course, it's us.
- U.S. Federal Government.
right now, type out a letter, have it create a RTF version of the document and while it is printing fill out the envelope and put a stamp on it. I don't get why so few people use Congress.org for that. It can create a formal looking letter that can be sent to your Senators in no time. It won't be ignored like email and it costs less than a dollar to send. Either send snail mail or STFU on your civil liberties. If you don't have the time to tell your Senator what you think, you don't deserve freedom.
So basically it'll work like this: If Pat Robertson signs up for 700club.kids.us, the government will give it to him because OF COURSE if it's Christian it must be good for the kids. But, if Covenant of the Goddess (Wicca, a federally recognized religion) signs up for cog.kids.us, what do you want to bet it'll be denied on some bogus grounds whether it's kid friendly or not?
This is just a tool for the ultra right to control the minds of children.
With an explicit "safe area" (which the big corps like Disney and yahoo can be certain to enter, even if no one else does) that kids will find lame, it can become now directly obvious to the "save the children" people that it is the children who are struggling out of their network straight jacket.
This means that it is no longer a case of "these evil people are sending bad stuff to our kids" and instead becomes a matter of "our kids are actively hunting for this bad stuff". Maybe it won't cause a complete and total reexamination of attitudes on everyone's part, but it might make those parents stuck in "my sweet, innocent darling wouldn't try anything bad" mode move on to more realistic positions.
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.
Get a grip people, this is an opt-in system. That is, nobody is forcing you to get your site registered in .kids.us, and no one is denying you your god-given right to have lots of Pr0n. This does not in any way abrogate your right to free speech. .kids.us - I can do it in squid in about 7 seconds. Essentially, it's just a "white-list", that guarantees me that this subset of sites will not have pornographic content.
<p>
What it does do is allow me to finally hook up the Internet to the computer my four-year-old son has in his room. It is trivially easy for me to setup a firewall filter that restricts that computer to
<p>
Why is this necessary? The other day I accidentally typed in "www.googlecom.com" instead of "google.com" in my web browser, and got treated to pictures of a women committing fellacio on some guy. I just checked and they are still there. Can you not understand why I would like to be able to let me son surf the web without being exposed to that kind of crap?
<p>
Now, before you come back with the old "you should supervise your children" line, let me make an observation: it is literally impossible for a parent to supervise all activities of all children all the time. Such supervision would require one parent per child 24x7, and, unfortunately, we do have to work sometimes!
<p>
So, there you have it. I have waited 5 years for something like this to be accomplished by the private sector, but all I get is crap like net-nanny, RSACS ratings that every pr0n site in the world overrides, and dozens of sites from HAX0RZ telling people how to get past the software. If the government can establish a domain name hierarchy that is guaranteed safe for kids, I'm all for it.
<p>
The bottom line is that no one has yet shown how allowing me to choose not to hear your speech infringes on your freedom of speech. Instead, it preserves your freedom of speech by giving me the right to choose not to listen.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Had a great comment on his show this week about .kids.us as opposed to .com....
"Yeah, that'll throw the pediphiles off the track"
I really think this is a good analogy. The internet (like a library) is a wealth of free knowledge. This is a good thing. My children love going to the library, and they love surfing the internet. In the library I can let them loose in the children's section and the chances of them coming across an explicit material is slim to none. The same cannot be said (right now) about the internet. Current censoring/filtering software just isn't effective as it needs to be (IMHO), and adding a kids.us SLD would definately make filtering easier and more effective.
For those of you without kids, here is an example. I set up bookmarks for my kids so they can easily get to sites they enjoy and are approved by me. The oldest is seven, so I am not worried about them going to Google, typing in "Britney Spears", and following some link to teen pr0n. I attempt to ensure no links exist that may lead out from the approved sites to pr0n (the internet's version of Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon seems to be Six Degrees To Pr0n). My seven year old knows she can only go to these approved sites, but she likes to type in the URLs herself. A simple typo in a URL can lead her to explicit material real quick. I would love for my kids to be able to go to something like google.kids.us, enter a search string, and get sites with only a "G" rating.
www.sguil.net
The Analyst Console for NSM
I'm sure .kids.us sounds like a good idea to most people. Even if you don't like it, you aren't likely to speak out against it because after all, you're not a kid and are fere to surf whatever domain you choose.
.kids.us... who are they? what ideologies do they endorse? what agenda do they represent?
.kids deems suitable for kids encourages things like individualism, free-thinking, and free inquiry.
But I worry about what will happen inside the domain. The people we collectively trust to censor and approve content for
Are we going to see a lot of candy-coated happy-faced life-is-good, nothing-to-worry-about, trust your parents and all other authority figures and never question them, etc.? Is this really what we want to expose our children to? I hope the sites
Children need to learn how to think independently and not just do what they're told and believe everything someone big says. They need to learn how to ask hard questions about the world they live in.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I was watching the national news this morning, and they had a story of that girl who was killed by the stranger she met in a chat room. They keep making a big deal of how kids are so much in danger of strangers online but consider this:
Based on the number of kids who chat online(millions) and the number of kids who have actually been molested/killed by dirty old men they chatted with(what, like 5?), it is safe to say that any given family has a better chance of winning the lottery than they do of having their child abducted by an internet predator. So our retarded-ass govt wants to pass more laws because the media scared the shit out of them. Aren't the lawmakers suppossed to know better?
I disagree with what connectusa is suggesting. I dealt with dialup for 11 years. Dialup is as fast a WAN connection that supported an office [of 13 people]I had worked in for 3 years.
I do not agree with the points connectusa is forwarding. We do not need this regulatory act to "save rural America."
My suggestion is to live with your dial up and quit whining. When it is economically viable either the Telco or the cable company will make high speed service available.
Or are we likely to all be forced down to a "safe" common denominator. At work will you company restrict you to "safe" sites so they don't get sued for creating a dangerous workplace.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Okay, knowing full well how Westminster style Parliament works (Ie: Canada, Australia, UK, etc), is the US system different?
I guess what I'm asking is, if a bill is passed by the house, does it then have to be passed by the senate and then the president? Or can the house do it all by itself?
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
Yes, they need to be introduced to the fact that life is not a vale of roses, but not shocked into that knowledge.
Children need to be protected. That's why nature made them small. You think they couldn't grow up faster physically? Sure they could. Pigs do it in a year. We have a long childhood because we have to absorb so much knowledge and do it slowly.
It's wrong to expose little children to too much "reality". I read "Hiroshima" when I was 9... Bad idea. Children should GRADUALLY learn about the harsh realities, when they are able to absorb such knowledge without it leaving big skid marks in their consciousness.
Children who grow up in a sheltered environment (not "candy-coated" or faked up, but tempered to their ability to understand) have stronger personalities. This is counter-intuitive, because there's an idea around that the school of hard knocks makes you "strong," but it is not so.
Actually, a simple way to keep most people out, would be to have the ISP provide two separate sets of DNS servers. One of the sets being limited to the specific domain.
When a person signs up for the account, they can choose to have only a kid.us domain name server, and have the ISP simply block port 53.
If the kid can get around both problems, whether through anonymous tunneling or finding a non-standard DNS server, it would probably be pretty useless to block the kid anyway.
Being this is for kids under 13, most probably have little interest in the technology required to break something like this.
Have you read my journal today?
"Remember, an equivalent bill has not yet been introduced in the Senate."
For once, the editor of story remembers to include a line to keep all the dimwits around here from going off half-cocked.
If only it WORKED...
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
It makes sense to me. Wasn't one of the problems with a .kids TLD was that different countries have different opinions on what is acceptable content for children? Now all the puritanical moms and dads of the good ol' US of A have some place safe on the web to babysit their kids.
bermuda$ whois naked.kids.us
No match for "NAKED.KIDS.US".
Alright, who's got the guts to try and register this?
Parents could set computer software to limit a child's access to only addresses ending in .kids.us.
And we all now that children now nothing about computers or how to change settings.
And the kids PC is not in the bedroom. Bad mistake.
...and at the same time, I don't.
When I got my first computer when I was 11 (a TRS-80 Color Computer 2), it was at first in a common area (the living room), but soon it was moved into my bedroom. Now, granted, I didn't have internet access (or even a modem), but it being there in my room allowed for the opportunity to explore in ways that amaze me to this day.
I will never forget typing in programs from magazines, modifying them, and learning what made them "work". I will never forget coding on my own on the weekends and after school, sometimes in the morning before school (if I could sneak the time in).
I remember doing my homework sometimes using SCRIPSIT, and printing it out on my CGP-220 inkjet - in the 6th grade. As I think about it now...
I wonder about kids who have to sit in a common area, and worry about their parents seeing something they are doing (maybe they want to write something "secret" or build a game or something), and they can't, because they feel they will get "caught".
Eeven when my parents let me get a phone and modem, and explore the BBS's around town, they didn't care when I was in my room, chatting with others across town (I was 13 when I got my first modem - 300 baud, whoop!). Now, of course, today there is the internet, broadband, easy access to porn of ANY flavor, online predators, viruses, and a whole slew of other bad stuff...
But I tend to wonder if maybe the kids should have a computer in thier room, but isolated from the net (either physically, or via a firewall - ie, allow them to roam the home net, but not the internet), so that they can explore in similar manners...
What boggles my mind today:
Kids have at hand the graphics, processing, data storage, RAM - you name it - things that were "dream devices" when I was a kid. Yet the number of kids who "own" computers that program, I would say, is far less than it was when I was a kid (I mean, for every kid I knew when I was a kid who owned a personal computer, every single one of them at least "dabbled" with programming). This saddens me...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
why, we'll let the happiest corporation on earth care for it - the Disney corporation. And as far as paying for it goes, well, hey - advertising hasn't failed the internet as a revenue model yet!
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Who is going to decide what is appropriate for kids.us? Would it be appropriate for CERT (as in www.cert.org) to have cert.kids.us? It doesn't really look very kids oriented to me, but some kids might be better prepared for their future careers if they can visit. And what about sites that provide information about issues kids might have to deal with, such as suicide and sexuality? If kids.us becomes the norm for all parents to restrict their children to, then it does become defacto censorship. And what's to prevent the next step in a couple years where parents and/or ISPs are required to deploy the restriction under legal threats? Would you or I as parents even be allowed then to let our children access a site some other parent would not?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Who are we going to allow access to having sites in the kids.us domain? Will controversial issues be allowed? Or will corporate policies be allowed to indoctrinate children unimpeded by opposing views? Will disney.kids.us be allowed to present their views on making most open source software illegal, unopposed?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Oh, you mean they're going to have to re-hire some of the web developers they have let go over the past couple of years?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
"A man who trades safety for freedom, deserves neither."
It's sad that those who represent our Govt. seem to pay so little attention to those who created it.
Well, after careful examination of the treatment of the bill that was finally agreed upon, [H.R.1877.EH], we find the following line embedded in there somewhere:
;)
by inserting `section 2423(b) (relating to travel with intent to engage in a sexual act with a juvenile),' after `motor vehicle parts),'.
Can you say 'taken out of context'?!
(sorry no link to this, but apparantly Thomas caches queries but doesn't furnish direct links, hence you gotta go through the search form)
When I grow up, I want to have Christopher Walken hair.
The obvious solution is to knock down all the walls and put in cubes. The kid gets the PC in his cube, and the parents get the constant ability to monitor.
After all, it has worked so well in an office environment.
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
THe actual "common area" is tucked away in a corner, not out in the regular TV/family room. Acessible, but not a constant bombardment of other people. Privacy, but anyone can walk by at any time.
Yes, hard core coding would be tough with constant interruptions. As it is, it's not really that way.
The bedroom is just too tough to monitor easily. If something surreptitious were to be happening, all the kid would have to do is keep an ear out for anyone climbing the stairs and close down for the moment. And then there is the 3 AM stuff.
A PC is the bedroom is sooo much harrder to monitor, and sooo much easier to slip into unwanted activities.
Kind of the same as having the boyfriend upstairs in the bedroom, anytime they want. Probably nothing is going on, but...you want to be sure.
Have you thought about WHAT the government is going to block? Yes, some parents are intelligent and won't put this on their kids, but most parents are dumb as FUCK! I mean, really, they had kids in the modern age- they can't be that smart in the first place. The real point, though, is that I don't want the government telling the majority of America's children what is wrong and what is right.
.kids.us server. With the current people in power, kids will not have access to any information that supports liberal/left leaning causes. I don't want the government deciding what kids hear about sex (let me tell you, I learned about sex at nine, not thirteen- and this is the way of the modern generation growing up), homosexuality, the practices (past and present) of the US Government, religion, natural rights and freedoms, and socially acceptable practices- among a hundred other things.
I can think of hundreds of sites for kids which would no doubt be kept of the
Freedom of information is neccessary, even for kids. I don't trust the people currently in charge of my government (who I did not elect because at the time I was too young, but have since come of voting age and am registered for the next election) to provide this. Free access is neccessary. It's not my job to not post or view porn on the internet just in case some stupid yuppy's kid happens upon it. It's the parent's responsibility to monitor what the child is viewing. If you don't have the time to keep half an eye on your kids a couple hours a day so they can use the internet, you shouldn't have kids! Freedom should not be sacrificed so that people can be negligent.
Don't fall for the 'oh, this isn't a big deal' trap. Do you want the government telling children what to think of hax0rs? Or Copy protection? Or Microsoft? I thought not.
"Anonymous cowards are just K-whores afraid of their accounts being modded down." - Bob the O (me)
This move has got to be high up on the idiot-o-meter. Now the pedophiles know exactly where to look -- and with the façade of safety, parents will let their guard down.
Yeah, REALLY smart idea.
[insert witty comment here]