Verisign Develops Token for Age Verification

FirstTimeCaller writes "A Reuters article is reporting that Verisign in conjunction with an unnamed children's safety group, will release a USB token that can be plugged into a PC to verify the age and gender of a person participating in online chat rooms. According to the article, the token will be available free to students in a handful of schools this fall. School administrators will provide a list of students, with their ages and genders, and VeriSign will encode that information onto the tokens."

Comments

Re:Credit card ?

[Paleomacus]

Well when I was 15(in 1996) I was able to get a debit card that could be used for 'adult' verification. Doesn't seem like a very good system to me.

Re:Credit card ?

[acceleriter]

This is about making sure you're a kid, not that you're an adult. The theory is that it'll keep the pedophiles, who won't have the "I'm a kid" token, out of the elementary school "chat rooms."

Besides the "problem" of pedophiles in "chat rooms" being completely overblown, this is probably just the precursor of some sort of infrastructure to eliminate anonymous browsing. And who wouldn't like a piece of selling a token for $20/year to anyone who wants to get any information from the Internet in 10 years?