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.
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 when I register sites like:
government.kids.us or
bush.kids.us
I'm actually saying that the government and Bush are fooling us?
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
Adds an whole new meaning to underage pr0n!
"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.
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??
...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.
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.
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.
This is already being proposed by Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. It is a bad idea because it allows the government to decide what is "harmful to minors" on the Web.
The bill proposing a .kids.us is much, much better because it is essentially a "kid-friendly" certification. It is essentially opt-in by the site owners (and regulated). A .xxx TLD would give us two options: (1) have the government shut down any non-xxx domain that the government thinks does not belong outside the red-light district, or (2) have only the legit xxx businesses move to the .xxx TLD and otherwise have the same situation we have today, with over 4,000 "regular" domain names pointing to a single web site.
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
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'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?
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.
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.
"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
bermuda$ whois naked.kids.us
No match for "NAKED.KIDS.US".
Alright, who's got the guts to try and register this?
slashdot isn't supposed to be rude, or xxx, but it's also not "Safe For Kids". People use expletives all the fucking time, and I personally wouldn't want to answer the question "Daddy, what's wrong with that mans butt?"
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
Sounds like a great opportunity for a company to exploit. Imagine one of those Cable/DSL routers that you can buy, use webmin to set a password, and it uses whitelists for everyone who doesn't have that password. Add an option to add or subtract specific sites/domains/pages. I'd bet they could charge $50 extra for a feature like that.
And why not a company that provides tailored whitelists? Some parents will want to disallow sex and violence, some will want to filter those as well as atheism and evolution, and others will want to filter just sex and fundamentalist religion. Make sure the contents of the whitelists are human-readable, and have public webpages for (a) submitting a candidate for the lists, (b) pending submissions, and (c) rejected submissions, perhaps with explanatory notes.
(Of course, you'd want just a blacklist option for the really liberal parents.)
Tie the router in with a subscription to such a whitelist company and it'd seem you'd have a surefire winner. No government intervention needed.
Dang... I may have to write up a business proposal and send it to Linksys...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Hmmm. I wonder if atheism.kids.us would have any problems getting registered?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
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
Probably slightly easier than alternativelifestyles.kids.us. Probably a lot easier than sexualissues.kids.us. Probably a lot harder than disney.kids.us (which could very easily use that site to promote their restrictive legal agendas unopposed).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Last time I was there, the library did not have a policeman preventing kids from exploring other sections of the library. While that may not yet be the case with kids.us, it could easily become so in the next wave of lawmakers on the loose. What if the next law requires parents to identify to an ISP when an account might be used by a child, and penalizes ISPs who allow such accounts to access any site besides kids.us?
At what age do you think that your kids should be free to roam about outside of the kids.us domain? While I certainly think a 7 year old has no need to access outside of what I think kids.us will be, a 14 year old, OTOH, certainly needs full latitude. The problem still exists that to let a child out to access the "whole library", they can also get access to "the alley out back" [goatse.cx].
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
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."