Kid-Safe Domain Created

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.

Comments

Bad solution.

[prizzznecious]

It would be much more sensible to create a domain of non-kid-"safe" content. That would facilitate filtering without creating the need for current content providers to make redundant registrations.

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.

Re:Bad solution.

[Anonymous Coward]

You miss the point.

The reason for the creation of a .kids domain is because any attempt at creating an adult only domain and REQUIRING adult oriented sites to go there is a 1st amendment violation. This has been hashed out beyond recognition. A .kids domain that is Opt IN is legal. a .XXX Domain that is required, is not.

Re:Bad solution.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

any attempt at creating an adult only domain and REQUIRING adult oriented sites to go there is a 1st amendment violation.

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.

Now taking bets..

[EvilStein]

How long will it be before www.*.kids.us becomes nothing more than a big advertisement for Nickelodeon, Disney, and Fox Kids?

Re:Now taking bets..

[CormacJ]

No bets there. The whole domain probably turn into one large toy advert.

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).

Hey, I have an idea!

[neksys]

Let's further fragment and complicate the internet in the name of our children's safety!!

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!

[Anonymous Coward]

Parents don't have time to filter ALL information on the internet. It's a question of amount of time to filter all content.

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.)

Re:Hey, I have an idea!

[inkswamp]

Christ - the problem of protecting children from offensive or adult content lies with the parents, not one some new-fangled US legislation.

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.

OK so far

[Jafafa Hots]

Its a better solution than some others, BUT

Who gets to decide what content is suitable? Will discussion of the birds and the bees not be permitted by the repubs, but sites that exploit kids by trying to sell them stuff be allowed?

So, no Learnhowyourbodyworks.kids.us or whatswiththesethingsgrowingonme.kids.us or somepeoplebelieveinevolution.kids.us, but plenty of disneyshop.kids.us or sugaredcereal.kids.us sites?

Re:OK so far

[syrinx]

I like how you bring up republicans as the ones who will censor.

Can we say "Tipper Gore"? How about "Hilary Clinton"? "Joe Lieberman"? Need I go on?

(not that the republicans are any better, but there are plenty of pro-censorship people on *both* sides, singling one side out isn't necessary)

This is a "good thing"...

[dkemist]

Most of the posts I've read seem to miss the point. While I'm completely opposed to selective censorship of the web as a whole, this provides a great solution for a "white list" of ok sites. Say a pre school or even grade school wants to provide limited internet access to their students. All they need to do is limit their access to the .kids.us domain. 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. Limiting the access to a specific domain that you have to qualify to get into is a good thing. Compare that approach to some of the current blacklists and url filters.

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"...

[sheetsda]

this provides a great solution for a "white list" of ok sites

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.

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

...how many companies will even bother? Not only would they have to shell out the cash for a new domain name, but they'd also have to hire more staff to make sure that all the links are following the rules. I'd imagine there's some nasty penalties if they don't.

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?

Message Boards

[Gyorg_Lavode]

How does this domain deal with websites which can be modified by users such as message boards? Will everything posted to a message board in this domain need to be heavily filtered so as to not link outside of the domain? What about addresses that are only published and not linked? What about links to email addresses, screen names, and chat rooms? I think it's also interesting to note that it does not allow chat or IM clients inside the domain. Does this mean that John can't give Jack his IM name so they can work on their presentation?

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.

Re:for those who read...

[LX.onesizebigger]

However, realizing what a large and profitable market kids are, I wouldn't be too surprised if this gains great interest among companies who want to profit from this (personally I think brainwashing ads from the toy and entertainment industries is far more damaging to a kid than nude people could ever be, but thats beside the point).

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.

How on earth is this going to work??

[cranos]

Just on a purely technical point, how are they going to govern the domain space. Are they going to setup a department just to keep checking up on the kids.us domains?

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??

[Skapare]

Maybe they can offer a contract to Google to spider the whole domain, but in addition offering a kids friendly search engine, 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??

[marauder404]

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 according to the HR Bill.

Re:How on earth is this going to work??

[ratamacue]

Are they going to setup a department just to keep checking up on the kids.us domains?

Of course they will. The objective here (like any non-core function of government) is (a) to spend tax money and (b) to acquire more power. What good would a new government program be if there wasn't something in it for the ruling class? As always, expansion of government equates to more "responsibility" (wealth and/or power) for those in the ruling class.

Re:This is just a whitelist

[LostCluster]

Because downloading and using a whitelist creates a hassle for the users. (You remember users, they're the people we work for, etc.) It's much simpler to have a rule... if it ends in ".kids.us" it must be safe.

is this a stupid question?

[mattrowe]

so... what's to stop someone from posting "questionable" content on a kids.us domain??

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?

[stratjakt]

Wherever the line is drawn, there'll be assholes who want to push it to make some kind of dumb-ass freedom of speech comment, like those that think they need to teach about homosexuality in kindergarten.

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.

Re:is this a stupid question?

[basse]

I totally agree with you that we should not rob children of their childhood, even though the whole concept of a "childhood" is new.

The problem is that our personalities are shaped during this childhood period. If we are only subjected to harmless (in general opinion, not necessarily in my) things, in this case sites, we are generally not equipped to cope with the not-so-harmless (again in general opinion) ones when we reach that magic age - be it 16, 18, 21 or whatever.

Another problem in your argument is that kids ask questions of all kinds - some of which fall into the not-harmless category. Should we just ignore these? I think children can cope with these questions, and for their own good they should be allowed to.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... don't want this to sound like a flame, but I'm not very afraid of kids being hurt by content because:

• Things that are weird for them (sexual images before teenage, senseless violence), they will ignore, perhaps just ask "what is that", and moving on.
• Things that do interest them (same sexual images when they get older), they can browse for all I care, if they choose to.

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.

This is *GREAT*.

[mindstrm]

Why? Several reasons.

1) It does not seek to regulate the whole internet.
2) The domain is .kids.us... in the US cctld..
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?

[The Ancients]

A couple of questions:

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

[dmatos]

Why does everyone seem to think that these sites won't be able to link to sites outside of .kids? What is gained by that?

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 one.

The real bonus of the .kids domain is it allows for easy filtering at the user-level. A firewall that blocks all domains outside of .kids. You can click on that goatse.cx link all you like, but the firewall will stop you from seeing, well, what none of us really want to see.

That way, if you have an adult surfing, they can actually follow links to relevant .com/.net/.org/.whatever sites that they want to see, and the .kids TLD will have the chance to be useful to us older folks as well.

Great, now just another domain everyone will need.

[emkman]

Every company is going to be forced to get a kids domain now, or be left out of this "new internet". What if i want to include a google box to search my own kid site, or link to current headlines at CNN? I can't because these are .com, and obviously not safe enough. Big companies can afford it, by why should everyone be forced to create new, possibly edited domains(cause they can only like to kids domains now too), just to be a viable part of the internet

Re:Ban advertising too

[LX.onesizebigger]

I think you're missing the point. Corporations can still set up sites marketing mind-numbing toys in 100% genuine plastic that will occupy your kids and condition them into good corporate slaves. They can then have these sites linked to from ads on other .kids.us sites. I believe the original poster wanted to stop this kind of corporate propaganda. I think the reference to Sweden was the fact that it is for example illegal for TV here to show ads directed at kids under the age of 12.

Re:uh, gee

[LX.onesizebigger]

Good evening kids. Nothing bad happened at all in the world today. The World Trade Center is intact. Bin Laden is really just a bearded old man. He is not mean. Nobody wants to hurt anybody. The President is good friends with the other nice guy in Iraq. Goodnight, kids.

Kids-safe news? I wish it were possible...

Re:uh, gee

[LX.onesizebigger]

No, I haven't, but yes of course, if we are going to be serious (as difficult as it is), I know there are good examples of news for kids. Here in Sweden there has been at least one good example of that. It's actually more worthwhile than the news for the grownups. I'm not sure it would meet U.S. standards with respect to 'protecting the children' though.

Organization

[Anonymous Coward]

This will fail miserable because most of the good content is on .com, .net, etc...So, if you build USHISTORY.kids.us you'll have to copy everything from the normal web to your site since you can't link out.

Plus, how is anyone going to know about other kids.us sites? Oh, wait:

http://www.google.kids.us

I can see it now: "Over 3423 pages indexed"

What difference does that make?

[Sanity]

For example, a Swedish court recently decided that Pokimon had to remove the phrase "Gotta catch em' all!" from their cartoons, since it was determined that the only purpose of this phrase was encouragement to children to buy Pokimon characters.

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.

What's an advertisement?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, um.

How do you distinguish what is and isn't advertising?

If mysite.kids.us has no banner ads, but says at one point "hey, here's a great site where you can buy lots of cool toys!" and links to http://www.toys.r.kids.us, and this is because toys r us paid me some money, is that advertising?

What if i am www.sore-hands.kids.us, and my site says "hey kids, mattell treats its employees unethically, so you should buy Bob the Builder toys instead, here's a link to toys.r.kids.us." and i mean that?

What if i am six years old, and i just like Toys R Us and get nothing whatsoever out of linking them?

If nickelodeon.kids.us is doing a new movie, and they're selling toys as part of a tie-in deal, can't they have a little banner up that says "click here to buy our new jimmy neutron action figures!" and link to toys r us.kids.us? Isn't that just an ad?

If they can't do that, can they physically embed part of toys 'r' us.com into their website in a frame, or do some kind of complex backend where you use and order stuff from the toys 'r' us website through nickelodeon.kids.us, perhaps through some kind of distributed object system? If nickelodeon can do that, why can't toys r us pay Random J Site from embedding bits of toysrus.kids.us? Isn't that worse than a banner ad?

Now, if you answer that any of the above are "not okay", or that a banner ad isn't, then what on earth makes http://www.toys.kids.r.us/ okay in the first place?? all that a toys 'r' us website would be is trying to sell things, and nothing else. It is both an advertisement for the toys r us chain of stores, an advertisement for the products they sell, and a commercial extention of their commercial business. The entire purpose of such a site is to manipulate children for profit.

What's an advertisement?

Face it. No one is going to set up a website under kids.us without SOME sort of commercial intent. Servers and domain names cost money. If you're setting up a website, you in some way are selling something, perhaps just the website itself. One way or another. We Are All Advertisements.

p.s. negativland.kids.us would be awesome, and it is my opinion that public policy should be arranged such that as few people as possible listen to www.sorehands.com

I think *you're* missing the point

[GuyMannDude]

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

[swillden]

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.

Re:What about IP addresses?

[J'raxis]

The FCC doesn't enforce censorship by installing filters on your TV or on the cameras. If a broadcaster violates FCC regs, they get fined.

The cops don't enforce speeding laws by putting devices in cars that limit their maximum speed to the posted limit. If they catch you speeding, they give you a ticket.

Just because you're dealing with a computer or the Internet, doesn't mean "enforcement" is going to be necessarily technological. They'll enforce it the same way they enforce other laws; if they catch you doing something illegal, you'll be punished for it.

(Although I wouldn't doubt that they'll use technological means to find out who's breaking the regulations - they could employ a webspider that checks every page on every page under the domain to make sure no anchors point outward.)

Hopefully librarians. . .

[kfg]

both in and out of schools, will be using all the focus on the internet as a distraction while quitely slipping these subversive documents called "books" to "kids" under the table.

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:so?

[Montreal Geek]

[...] and making sure they do not come across things they shouldn't.

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:uh, gee

[geekee]

The point is, the govt. is leaving the choice up to the parents. They're setting up a kid safe domain, but they're not saying this is the only place where kids can surf. It's up to the parents whether or not they want to restrict access to this domain. When the parents think they're old enough, they can let other content through.

Re:Ban advertising too

[dirk]

How many "kids sites" are anything but an advertisement? Nickelodeon.com is nothing but an ad for their shows. Same with cartoonnetwork.com. Most kids sites are there to promote some TV show, or book series, or whatnot. Saying you can have those, but not advertisements for other toys, etc seems a big hypocritical.

This is crap - betrayal of WWW's purpose.

[Dogun]

What a fool.
Now no .kids.us sites can reference anything upper-brow, as upper-brow sites won't be .kids.us.

I don't know about you, but I wasn't exactly interested in seeing all my kid friendly information about "Lydia" or whatever crap book I had to read back when I was in 4th or 5th grade, and I sure as hell don't want my children hanging around these labotomized websites.

This is just another excuse to push doctrine on kids - because I GARUNTEE you, no .kids.us site is going to mention that the first mention on Thanksgiving was in 1863, or that the Plymouth 'pilgrims' were first mentioned as such in 1870; .kids.us is committed to the wrong idea.

We need to be USING this wealth of knowledge that we have created for ourselves and our children. We need to be exposing them to powerful ideas at young ages; we need those kids who want to learn about the lies of their history to be able to learn about them, we need kids to be able to access information about draft dogders, we need to let our children be able to listen to dirty music, and yes, we need to let them see hate literature, to make what they will of it - and hopefully it generates disgust, but they damned well need the CHOICE to be disgusted.

WE MADE A DREAM of knowledge - we were spoonfed knowledge and WE WERE TIRED of it - BBS's, USENET, ... and though the Web may as well be some governement defense project the fact is that the information is the collective talents of our world, for better or for worse.

Our kids must grow up in this world we have created for them - this INFORMATION world. This kid-safe subsection - it's crap. No offense, but if this .kids.us document were a person, I would beat him senseless and piss on his wretched limp body after I was done with him.

That being said, I make a final plea - .kids.us is a huge mistake.

You want to protect your libraries? Look at your homes first - how can you claim to respect knowledge when you block it out of the very place you live in, and shield your young, your curious from the wealth they seek? If you buy into this .kids.us crap, or buy filtering software, you might as well walk to your local library, strike up a book of matches and start burning, and while you're at it, burn your schools, public and private, and kill everyone who has every said anything intelligent.

I'm sorry I ranted but this is one of the few times in my life that something bad has happened that is unlikely to be overturned, despite the efforts of everyone out there. Tonight, I praise all of you with bloody knuckles because of the pent up fury of this attrocity against knowledge, learning, and the betterment of our society.

May the world weep.

Re:so?

[Montreal Geek]

Not all parents want their 8 yr. olds to stumble across porn on the web.

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

Few problems.

[iamroot]

I'm sure this probably will have been said several time by the time I click submit but:

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 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 .XXX domain. It would probably be a good thing to have one. The problem is if sites are forced to move to .XXX. Now, actual porn sites shouldn't have as much of a problem moving their domains. But what about sites that AREN'T porn sites, yet contain nudity, or even pornography. My site, for example, has a funny picture archive, and I'm sure some of those have nudity, or may be mildly pornographic. However, it is NOT intended as a porn site by any amount.

Anyways, back to the .kids domain. "So what's the problem?", you might ask, "Its only designed as a domain that parents can let their kids use without being worried.". I wish that would be true. Unfortunately, thats not what will happen. It'll be used as a whitelist for censorware. Schools will then end up only letting kids use the .kids domain. Even libraries may be affected.
Oh well, at least its not a mandatory .XXX domain.

I give it 2 weeks

[dracocat]

I say 2 weeks after the domain is available we will see the article about a porn site that came up in the domain.

Why is this government-controlled?

[0x0d0a]

Apparently, .cn has similar restrictions...

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?

[Hans Lehmann]

It's quite easy for a private company to build (and spider) a *.kids.com domain or something similar.

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?

[0x0d0a]

Because there's no profit in it.

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?

[Lumpy]

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.

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 ,3 hardcore nasty porn sites and 6 actual sites with what she wants.

I personally think that they should force all porn to .porn TLD and solve the problem once and for all. but people will whine, these are the same people that dont have the balls to park in front of the dirty book store.

the internet is a information trading tool... not a porn entertainment center, unfortunately it's becoming that first and foremost. Having .kids is a step in the right direction... .porn needs to be the next one... unless the internet community can police it's self. I highly doubt it.

Re:Why is this government-controlled?

[Lumpy]

You, quite frankly, are an idiot

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 .porn TLD, a website on yeast infections that show clinical full spread crotch photos on the front page first thing ALA goatse.cx style? yes it needs to be FORCED into the .porn TLD if they do not comply with common decency.

Re:uh, gee

[God! Awful 2]

I don't really follow your argument, as it jumps around a lot. I certainly don't think that children should be sheltered from sex until they are 18. But I also don't think that they need to find out about some of the evils of this world until they are old enough to understand why they happen. And I don't want to expose them to dangerous ideas until they are old enough to think critically.

As for protecting the safety of children, I'd rather tell them simply "don't take candy from strangers" rather than "don't take candy from strangers because they might abduct you, then rape and kill you."

-a

Think with your brains people

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm seeing a lot of people here bemoaning this, saying things like "my parents never withheld anything from me (and I'm superior because of it)"

First of all, you can be damn sure your parents DID withhold things from you. Were your parents having sex in front of you? Swearing in front of you? Did your parents let you watch XXX movies, smoke pot and do heroin at age 3? Probably not.

Yes, taking care of kids is a parent's responsibility. But, the obvious inescapable truth is that parents cannot hope to spend every second of every day with every child they have, while also doing everything else they need to do. (It's provable!)

Parents need tools to help them. Parents are supposed to read every book their child reads? Go to every website their child goes to *before* the child does? (Impossible of course)

The way the web works it is impossible to know where you can end up 2 minutes from now. You can literally go from BarneyIsMyFriend.com to a xxx site in 10 seconds.

This is an OPT-IN network. It isn't any different than ratings on movies. Now you may say who needs ratings? Well, do you want to watch two hours of "The Happy Little Elves" to be 100% sure that the last 2 minutes isn't a crazy orgy? No. Do you want to go see Pokemon the movie in theaters once to make sure it is ok, then go AGAIN with your kids?

And at least with movies you know that if your kid is at home they aren't watching movies in the theater. You know what tapes you have, what DVDs you have, what is on TV at that time on the channels you get, etc. Its just a lot easier to manage than a system you can use on your computer that lets you see *anything* at *anytime.*

If you really can't stand the domain, don't use it. If you hate ratings don't use those either.

It isn't censorship or a free speech issue. If companies want they can opt-in, if you want you can limit your kids to only using that domain. If a company wants to make a broader version of their site they can just put it up under a new domain. Nobody is stopping your kids from using the internet the way they normally do.

Oh the sanctimonious holier than thou hath spoken.

[jotaeleemeese]

Wherever the line is drawn, there'll be assholes who want to push it to make some kind of dumb-ass freedom of speech comment, like those that think they need to teach about homosexuality in kindergarten.

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).

Like a Bookstore

[wirehead78]

Wouldn't this operate similarly to how a bookstore or a library works? There's always a kid's section. Parents know that their children can go there and find children's books. They don't have to worry about them stumbling upon something they'd object to. But at the same time, the rest of the library is still there to explore. It's just that the kid's section helps kids find exactly what they want without having to sort through other junk they (or their parents) don't want.