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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.
Apparently, .cn has similar restrictions...
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
How long will it be before www.*.kids.us becomes nothing more than a big advertisement for Nickelodeon, Disney, and Fox Kids?
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.
I propose we call it .com
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.
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?
This space available.
Apparently, you want to watch this space.
That was linked from nic.us.. it's the page for the kids.us domain. Apparently Neustar is still holding a public comment period asking for advice on how to run the thing.. apparently they didn't really want to create this domain and don't have any idea how to go about doing the thing, so they seem to be hoping on letting "the community" come up with ideas.
The public comment period isn't over yet, though, so it *looks* like you can't get one yet.. on the other hand, as an interested party (i.e. an individual with a kids-specific site) this would probably be a great opportunity for you to make your voice heard..
You miss the point.
.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.
The reason for the creation of a
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.
Why didn't they just call it kids.r.us? Then they could sell toys too!
.. if you want to register goatse.kids.us ...
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.
I do security
Washington Boast
Wednesday, December 4th, 2002; 12:30PM
President Bush today signed legislation that seals off the P-rated (Parents Only) "neighborhood" for parents on the World Wide Web.
The Dot-parents implementation will contain items that kids may not look at. All content that is suitable for viewing after kids go to bed will be available at .parents.us sites.
These sites will only be available after 10PM in most time zones, except for CST (which will have it available after 9PM).
Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), remarked that the new domain was just what his doctor ordered. Sen. Dorgan says "We're not censoring anything. We're just making it available after 10PM for parents only."
Sex - Find It
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.
I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
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.
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?
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.)
Bar and George must be very proud.
Mods - please don't mod this up, Dubya can only count to 3.
Why? Several reasons.
.kids.us... in the US cctld..
1) It does not seek to regulate the whole internet.
2) The domain is
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.
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!
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?
.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.
.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.
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
That way, if you have an adult surfing, they can actually follow links to relevant
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
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.
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.
Yup, easy filtering. Now I have a way to filter out some of those stupid kid's sites that are keeping me from finding more porno.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Isn't .ca the TLD for California? I thought Canada was .ca.uk, or .ca.fr, or something.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
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.
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.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
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
watch this
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Actually you're a bit wrong on that, you MUST be in Canada to register a .ca domain
http://www.ca/
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
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
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.
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
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.
May we never see th