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The Future of the kids.us Internet Domain
MxReb0 writes "The National Telecommunications and Information Administration will host a half-day forum, entitled 'The kids.us Internet Domain:
Developing a Safe Place on the Internet for Children.' kids.us is a new direction of the www, overseen by the Department of Commerce and now offering registration. The forum will address the current state of the kids.us domain and future content and applications for the space. Will only allowing .kids.us sites be the new direction for a kid-safe internet?"
Is there any review process or monitoring to keep a domain from being a pr0n site..
Is that why this is a YRO, cause your filtered...
Sounds good to me. Unlike that whole .porn incident, I doubt anyone is going to be forcing a site under by moving it to a kids.us domain. Just keep a track on the sites, because the first sight of a suggestive picture, and I predict this will fly in the face of the whole program.
The Department of Commerce?? Gotta get the kids into capitalism early I guess...
Assuming that the .kids.us thing works out, I think that would be a part of it. It seems to me that the prudent thing to do for filtering companies would be to filter against a blacklist for .kids.us sites, and a whitelist for all other sites. The other option would be to use filtering technology (and a blacklist of course) to filter out normal (non .kids.us) sites, and then allow all .kids.us sites (possibly subject to a blacklist).
Either way, it will be interesting to see the problems this comes across (in sites that shouldn't be there getting there) and if it fails or not.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Would somebody please think of the .children.us!
Thank goodness we soon will no longer have to actually pay attention to our children ourselves! Our society will be so much better off once we don't have to take any responsibility for our kids.
Also, it looks like the sites are hand-picked by someone. I don't trust them to select enough of the right sites to allow kids to make informed decisions about things like religion, politics, etc (and yes, I think kids are capable of making these decisions if we allow it).
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
I see goatse.kids.us is still available :).
Rich
Have any of you tried *registering* these domains? They're $100 per year! Look! http://resellers.000domains.com/ This looks like some scheme by someone who registered kids.us and wants to make money off of people by charging an insane amount for some "certification process".
If it looks like it is successful, then the courts will have an excuse to toss out the Child Online Protection Act permanently.
The internet will NEVER be safe for kids by themselves. This is simply due to the fact that parents have different views on what is "safe" and "acceptable". Hell, a science website about evolution is unacceptable to millions of parents.
:P).
So what I am saying is: this didn't/doesnt work with TV (though that is debatable I guess) and it wont work with the internet. You can't rely on ratings or screenings to do the job of a good parent.
The internet is an amazing thing for kids. It opens them to the whole world, and that can be both a scary and enlightening place. You can learn about anything you want on the internet, and it's even more accessable than a library. Kids should not be quickly banned from this tool. The internet is information, and kids must be exposed to it, BUT kids must have parents to put it in context.
I am very bias of course. I have always been given 100% access to the internet since I was 8. I never looked at pornography (I honestly never felt the need), and although I looked at different hate sites,etc, I only did it to get a view of the other side (I disagree with them, if you need reassuring). Im still rather young, but I can't imagine what my life would be like if my parents didn't let me have unaltered access to the internet. For one, I found a hobby I love, and I am never afraid to learn something new. If someone is discussing something I know nothing about, I simply do some reading on it.
Sorry to be offtopic, but I've had this on my mind for a while. Letting me have access to the internet as a little kid was probably a risky thing for my parents to do, but I grew up (IMO) ethical and more sensitive than most (I still cant stand the site of violence, even though I see it plenty (cant escape it)). I guess I assume if I turned out fine (better in fact!), than most kids will, and that's naive (also elitist, but hell, I'm a member of slashdot
Safe like McDonalds, or safe like Mr. Rogers?
There *IS* a difference.
As per beforewisdom (729725)'s sig:
Fast Food: Corporate America in your body
Television: Corporate America in your mind.
Need to add:
kid.us: Corporate America in your spawned ones.
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
Fictitious news, 1 year from now.
The Atlanta Bee reports today that Kidland, the largest online kids resources website was hacked by two russian crackers and thousands of kids saw the most obscene and female-objectifying porn imaginable for thirty minutes while site adiministrators tried to restore normal service. Unable to do so, they shut the site down. It should be noted that the domain, kidland.kids.us, was specifically designed to provide an area on the internet safe for children.
In other news, Paris Hilton claims she has nothing to do with the release of her adult video "Paris does Paris"
"Piter, too, is dead."
Although I agree with some posters stating that children can make decisions and other posters saying that children need to be directed into making their decisions correctly, I wonder who's morrals will be followed in the sphere of this domain? Will it be some bible thumping conservative nut job who goes overboard or another form of fanatic, or even decision by committy, which could be worse than either. .kids.us can be completely secure from preditors or pr0n, I don't know. As well as, I personnaly question the ability of others to judge what is appropreate viewing for my children... I base this on past experience with the likes of Tipper Gore and the PMRC (Peoples Music Rights Commision) or the nut jobs that got merry go rounds outlawed in Canada because a few too may children flew off and the ones who got play grounds converted into zero story climbing apparati painted on the soft rubber flooring.
I for one want to see what happens with seach engines directed specifically at kids.us. It should be interesting to see a domain specific search that has an interface designed for, lets say kids aged ~3 to ~12. Or some segmentation of this age range.
Whether or not
I want to see a safe place where children can be children but I don't want to see a bubble room where nothing touches them and they touch nothing.
As a designer we are told to design things which can not cause harm to children, or are not dangerous. I believe that life threatning danger is something that should be avoided, but damn if kids need to hurt themsleves once in a while in order to learn some things. How many of you touched the stove after being told not to? How many of you did it again?
Granted images and or thoughts given to children at impressionable ages have unknown effects on their future development, and some limitation on what they can see or read is important, but who is to say things like same sex couples, people or pets passing away, or a host of other topics children see in the real world and go looking for answers, can or can not be answered where they can find them.
If a child sees two men holding hands on the street and thier parents don't give a believeable answer, where does the child go when kids.us search engine doesn't return any hits or returns hits from some religious fanatical association condemning it as blasphemy. The child will either go to other sources, the regular internet, or they believe what they see and become gay bashing teenagers when they grow up. Granted I stated that the effects on their future development of what they read or see can not be fully known, but if you only ever hear that something is bad, or good with no other choice, you tend to believe it.
flinging poop since 1969
This could be useful for parents who want to give their children access to the internet but who don't have time to supervise their surfing too closely (ie. they are in the house and aware of the child's presence in their room which is usually enough to ensure their physical well-being.) They could limit the child to .kids.us domains until they can sit down and supervise surfing directly which is about the only sure-fire way to keep them safe on the 'net at large
However there are sites that kids should have access to but which it may be irresponsible to let them have unrestricted access to. I'm thinking specifically of Wikipedia. As a wiki it can never guarantee that all content will be suitable, but as an encyclopedia it could be an invaluable source of learning for kids.
Therefore it's not enough that parents just restrict their kids to .kids.us at all times, but it could be useful to allow the kids more online time when the parents can't supervise too closely.
Why is anything anything?
I'm only a few months from no longer being a "kid" (legally, of course, although IANAL).
Censoring children is the indecency argument, abstracted by a generation or two. If you "protect the children" from all the things you don't want anyone to see, with a strong repetitive message about the badness of sneaking a peak of whatever it is, the theory is that most people will grow up not wanting to see it. More likely, they will grow up with an involuntary emotional knee-jerk to the thought of exposure to any of the "bad" things, and actively endorse suppression of such "bad" material. For the children.
:= Bad.) It also leads to indiscriminate classification, which just means indiscriminate action or inaction regarding content.
I suppose the desire is to have a self-moralizing population, so that as much as society as possible is on auto-pilot on the proper moral course. There are problems with this desire. The first is the emotional and religious nature, or at least the description, of the problems. This prevents objective analysis of effects of content exposure. (Boobs
Now, there's a lot of research that says that an imbalanced exposure to certain kinds of stimulus, violence for instance, leads to unstable behavior. I've never seen anything concrete that says exposure to such content corrupts; just the natural assessment that too much of anything is a bad thing.
Anyhow, getting back to my original point, the purpose of efforts like this is to form the mental and emotional structure of the generation which will win the battle for morality and indecency. It's not a conspiracy. It's just an emotional desire by a lot of people who've already had such an upbringing, who want to extend it, and have found an outlet for that desire. I consider it insidiously damaging to an enlightened, scientific, [classical] liberal, OR scientific nation, as all four of which the ".us" was founded. That is, the effects are insidious, not the desire or the intentions of those wishing for this.
Personally, I've found that I have a sort of natural morality built into my consciousness. I think it's empathy. It guides my every emotion. Pain, exploitation, deceit, humiliation, they all repel me, probably as I've experienced some very minute facet of them in my life, and I can very clearly read the same feelings in others as if they were my own. I don't hate myself, don't wish to experience that, so I don't wish it on others, so some 9/10ths of all pornography turns me off or does nothing for me. I find empathy, along with reason, to be God's natural gifts to humanity to use to determine morality. Perhaps we took them from the Tree of Knowledge. Either way, I know what's right and wrong, and I've learned to see it in the world through my free exposure to information from an early age. Along with liberty and contextual guidance, a good good prescription of physical touch and affection should give you the greatest and brightest sorts of youth.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
Will there ever be a .xxx tld? Seems like this would be a lot more useful...
Woo-hoo. A "domain" for american kids. What about the rest of the world?
Anybody can register a domain and license subdomains to their customers. What's so different here?
To really make sense, they would have to create a new, regulated top level domain (.kids)
~rL
giving news to mini nerds kids go to slashdot.kids.us ;-) (it actually goes to slashdot.org)
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.