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Verisign Develops Token for Age Verification

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the plugging-in dept.

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."

6 of 417 comments (clear)

  1. Man, a 13 year old could make a big profit by scythian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Selling his or her token to some freak on ebay!

    --
    terpmotors.com
  2. Just what little tommy needs! by palad1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A personal x509.3 certificate and a crypto key.

    So when he's 21 he won't complain when the barcode on his forearm will be used to 'strenghten e-vote security'.

    Train them while they are still young, the older they get, the harder for you to teach them new tricks...

    Oh, wait, this only works with pkcs#11-enabled chat applications? I guess IRC will have to be outlawed then. You don't want untagged pedophile commies subverting little Tommy on IRC now, do you?

  3. Re:Credit card ? by ninthwave · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And what kid wouldn't trade there cheap token for a chat room that they see as stupid to some grimy adult for something else?

    --
    I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
  4. Re:Credit card ? by jmcmunn · · Score: 5, Insightful


    Yeah, because we all know that none of the pedophiles out there have kids of their own who might leave this key plugged in, or laying on the desk for dad/mom to use?

    This is dumb, this does about as much good as the pages before porn sites telling people to not enter if they are not 18. Big deal, a USB key that tells someone I am young. It'll be 2 days maximum until some geek gets ahold of one and then you can buy them online for $25 +S/H.

  5. Re:Right... by jrod2027 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Or how about how long will it take for some pedeophile to get ahold of one of these tokens?
    Instead of relying on children to take their word of how old they claim to be, the kids could be fooled by a false sense of security with these IDs.

    Peodophile: I'm an 11 y/o kid honest... see my Verisign token proves it.
    Kid: Wow, you're right. Want to go hang out?

  6. Re:Nothing is perfect! by Paleomacus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We're not looking for flawless. It just seems that this system is completely broken.

    It's really not better than nothing at all. The illusion of safety can be more dangerous than being wary of threat.