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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.
So any site under kids.us is safe for kids. Sites are only safe for kids if they're under kids.us. Why not just create a whitelist of kids-safe sites. In order to get on the list, you must not link to sites that aren't on the whitelist.
Works out the same, but eliminates the cost of the domain to the website owner.
It sure is good to know that our children will be safe from being accidentally redirected to dangerous, kid-unfriendly sites like www.cnn.com when they're hanging around nickelodeon.kids.us. Way to go, GWB.
.us domain is the reason there's absolutely nothing there.
Actually, i'm just being cynical, i guess that is a pretty good idea.. a kid-safe playground that you can let your children run free on without any worry they'll run across anything "bad". I'm liking this idea the more i think about it, but i'm worried about what happens when they start deciding what is and isn't "kid-safe".. for example, what happens the first time someone puts something that really isn't kid-appropriate up on kids.us.. or what happens the first time that someone attempts to claim that something like, say, the web page for that Nickelodeon special about kids who have gay parents, and the intolerance they face (you know, the one that all the child psychologists lauded and all the religious groups tried to have nickelodeon boycotted for) declared "unsafe for kids.us"...
I wonder if the fact that actual laws have to be passed to introduce any changes in the administration of the
I hope they realize that they are passing legislation which disallows linking to international sites, even if they are kid safe... i guess our kids will only be getting US approved history as usual.
Well hopefully the librarians at schools will keep at least one or two computers available for doing real research on sites like BBC, etc. who may not feel the need to create a special US version of their material available just for kids in the US.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
No it wouldn't. That wouldn't be at all useful. Sure, you couldn't block children from going there, but you can't force everything non "kid-safe" into that one corner. This way, you can have an inclusion only filter, which is always easier to set up. I don't see a few "redundant" registrations as being a problem, they don't exactly eat up a noticible amount of money or Internet resources.
On the whole, this is a good thing for those of us concerned about censorship. Having said that, I think that they should take a leaf out of Sweden's book, and ban advertising on the kids.us domain too. Advertising is manipulation for profit, and psychological manipulation of children for profit is revolting IMHO, more so than most of the things that won't be permitted under the kids.us domain.
I was about to post this response. Giving parents more options & making it easier on them is never a bad idea. And clearly, nothing will prevent poor parenting from fscking up a kid. But given that even the best parents do not have an unlimited amount of time/energy to devote to their kids, and legislation like this can help them use that time more efficiently. I hope that continuing legislation allows for .kids.uk, .kids.de, etc., although I have a feeling we're going to run into some major "what should kids be allowed to see?" issues, even within .kids.us
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
[Original poster posits linking to goatse.cx]
Of course this raises the question: what is inappropriate content?
I'm pretty sure that goatse would be classed slightly inappropriate for small children. I mean, christ I'm over 30 and I found it traumatic enough to add an entry pointing goatse.cx->127.0.0.1 on my nameserver!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
The idea here is obviously to create a domain that kids can use unsupervised, so you would limit their machines to that domain by use of a proxy of some description. If they need access to things outside that domain, they can do so under supervision
Inability to access other content is unlikely to be a problem anyway, since it's not merely a question of whether content is suitable for kids, but whether it is targetted to kids. Pre-teen kids aren't usually much interested in content that's not designed for kids anyway.
If the content is targetted to kids, the domain owner is likely to register under that domain anyway.
The only thing I'd like to have seen is that it be .kids, rather than .kids.us, but I guess the limitation to .us is for political reasons - surprisingly, for Bush, in an effort not to appear to be acting as the President of the World.
Actually, what I want to know is whether there are any provisions that the kids.us domain could be extended to other countries. The article said that sites in kids.us would only be allowed to link to other sites in kids.us, but does the legislation provide for the event that other countries' kids-friendly domain names could be linked to? i.e. If Canada created a kids.ca or the UK created kids.uk, are there provisions that would allow sites in kids.us to link to these sites?
I know this would make the domain system even more complicated, but it could prove useful.
Are they gonna prosecute porn spammers to email servers on that domain? If so, a lot of adults (including me) will want a .kid.us email account!
Also, a new venture as a non-free (say $5-$10 a month) email service might be a good idea. As an ISP, all you would have to do is report spammers to the USG.
665: The mark on the forehead of Satan's slightly less evil brother, Stan.
You'd simply be an asshole if you did and your site would probably be shut down. I think it's great that there will be a domain for children's web sites. It will make parents' jobs easier when it comes to keeping track of what they are doing and making sure they do not come across things they shouldn't.
so they would have to disable any offsite links that are not going to *.kids.us.... and i assume that would include banner ads? wierd..... so would there be kid-specific pop ups too?
i would think the news would be a mess to run because they sometimes include links. it would end up being a whole new site, so i guess they could "tone it down". i guess i should have looked to see what the target age group is before overpondering.
maybe it's more thought out.. but in general it seems like a major headache.... though maybe a good idea. talking to some parents i have noticed how darn scared they are about letting their kids online (even early teenagers).....
i could see people liking it if there is someplace you could let your 6 year old romp with no fears of pr0n, or them signing up for credit cards or something.
I got modded down 'cause I was against this..which shows how purely clueless some are. First off, the Government is going about this BACKWARDS...they should have instead adopted the domain .xxx or similar and required all the 'bad' stuff to be there! What they did instead is the equilavent of fencing the children IN as opposed to keeping the bad stuff OUT! But then we do this all the time in the USA these days, don't we? Instead of cleaning the streets of criminals, we instead lock ourselves in our homes! Look, I'm tired of the Govt. in the USA deciding things for me and my family. I raised three kids, the oldest a girl who's a Freshman at Harvard now..and I did it without Govt. help.
My kids all used (and use) the 'net and I supervise them. Also, I raised them right...they know what to look at and what not to..and they ask me when they need advice. Why should I (and they) be forced have to lower myself to SOMEONE ELSE'S lowest common denominator..why can't they RAISE themselves up to mine? We have laws that limit people's access by age to movies,..to cigarettes, to drinking..to driving...even to viewing certain TV shows. We don't BAN them from coming into a movie theater building where there's an R movie playing on the next screen..or a food store that happens to sell cigarettes and liquor..or the TV completely..yet so many of you here are simply GUSHING about a domain that does EXACTLY that!
Why would you want to do this? Again I say..it's stupid and makes no sense!
Overly technical legislation is never good.. this is like spam laws that say you have to put ADV in the subject. What about wireless and other non-SMTP spam? There are plenty of ways to spam someone that don't include a subject field.
.kids.us domain am I liable for content on message boards? Am I liable if my site gets hacked and someone posts links to Yahoo.com?
In the same way, there are plenty of ways to 'link' to a site. Does this only restrict A HREF? How about setting window.location in Javascript? Or I could make a dummy form and use buttons for links. What if I put in the URL of a porn site but don't make the link clickable? What if I just mention a web site's name, as in "I bought it on the eBay site?" Also, if I own a
The problem is that the kids are smarter than the parents, and this will continue to be a problem. When the kids are grown, their kids will be more intelligent. Adapting, evolving call it what you will. I don't know about you, but I can knock out content advisor without a password, and without a hack, all you have to do is edit the registry. Hell 5yr olds hack the registry these days while their parents are still on the phone with tech support figuring out what their mouse is so they can follow the instructions to activate content advisor. Most tech savvy parents are intellectuals and are more in tune with reality (imho) and thus are less apt to be as heavy into content restriction.
This is an awful idea! It's been asked over and over again: Who decides what is safe for kids? Since there are so many differing opinions on what is ok, it only makes sense to let the parents decide individually.
.us domain (or tld, I've seen both reported), there are no ongoing costs. After the tax incentives are repealed, web page authors will be forced to rate their pages if they want to be seen.
Specific metadata needs to be available for content which can then be filtered by policy. There's already a well defined system in place to support this: ICRA (formerly RSACi). A simple tag on each web page (or just the root for the site) tells what content the page or site contains. It can then be left up to parents to set access permissions, like no viewing of nudity except in an artistic context, or no graphic violence.
Labeling can't be mandated directly, but here's an easy way to make ICRA universal:
1. Give tax incentives to businesses that use ICRA labels, and make it a crime to misrepresent a site by placing incorrect ICRA labels in pages. There wouldn't be any legal suits (at least any with merit) over page misrepresentation as ICRA tags describe in very concrete terms what a page contains (e.g. full frontal nudity, descriptions of drug use, etc...) rather than value judgements (e.g. kid safe).
2. Wait until ICRA becomes mainstream, then ship browsers that default to blocking sites that don't rate themselves.
3. Remove the tax incentives.
Unlike creating a new
I'm not saying anything new here. This has been around for a long time.
Uh, yeah, it does.
.edu domain and let me know what happens.
Go try and register a