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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."
So, not only are students going to be forced to carry yet another form of ID, but they'll also have to give a third-party company (Verisign in this case) detailed personal information.
What about student's rights - they have the right to enter chat rooms, etc.
I can envision the next step - restricting web sites based upon age, then it will be restricting web pages based upon being a student, finally, just restricting overall.
Luckily, we won't have to worry about this being a wide-spread problem - the system is too flawed to go very far; however, I feel for those that WILL be made to use it.
Bottom line is that NOBODY should HAVE to use this system - somehow it should infringe upon their right to freedom of assembly. Albeit, a *virtual* assembly, it's an assembly!
I agree it's a dumb idea--but I think it's really a segue into some companies requiring these tokens for everyone who wants to do business with them. The Federal government, for example, has been trying to figure out for years a practial way to give each citizen a public key to be able to, for example, apply for Social Security benefits or file a FEMA claim online. But since the easiest place to put a public key, a National ID card, spawns (rightfully) mention of the Book of Revelation happens every time it's mentioned, USB keys could be an alternative.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Well, I can't get a credit card at all (20 years old) due to bad credit.
Not a very good system.
^^
is to adults. You can't prove you are an adult and thus entitled to something more by NOT having one of these.
The goal to Verisign is obvious -- once they are widespread, you try to get first libraries and then other places to require the use of the "KEY" to use the system to prove your age. As an adult, you'd "need" one, and thus have to pay for it.
Also, its a good first step toward a "universal" (as if) public key. Ideally, imagine something like the Post Office being able to assign a public/private key to you. That's what everyone wanted with these keychain java keyring things talked about in the 90's.
Personally, I hate seeing verisign being given this contract, but I'm not sure someone shouldn't have it.
I'd like to see a U.N. sponsored standard, with countries and or businesses able to register as registrars. The SSL key distribution system we have now works pretty well (if overly expensive).
At a minimum, that same system applied to people as apposed to web server names would go a long way.
Yes, I know all the usual issues apply -- how do you prove its YOU with the key, etc. Lots of discussion on that (which is off topic) and other things. Privacy? What about additional private certificate keys? Well, why not all those things.
Personal ID should have a data component for public key.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
This is NOT a step in protecting anything.
1) For a child to be protected, they MUST have the fob.
2) They must use it on presribed machines with the right software.
3) Some big brother is watching out for them.
What this really is a step to personally "brand" everyone. Just like RFID in clothes or under the skin or the tatoos of Germany.
Further you can only be "safe", if you are willing to "pay" for it, including tracking every one of your habits on net.
Besides the "problem" of pedophiles in "chat rooms" being completely overblown
You're right. Most pedophiles attack children they know: their own, their family's children or their neighours.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Also, what about people that don't feel comfortable giving out their credit card information for age verification purposes? I don't want my credit card information all over the web.
Exactly.
Freedom has a price. The freedom to travel freely, however you want to, means that a few thousand people a year will die in car accidents. The freedom to speak your mind means that somewhere, sometime, some folks are going to abuse that freedom and incite a riot during which people die. The freedom to keep and bear arms means that some people will be wrongfully shot.
You can't have the good without the bad.
So, yeah, it's not exactly no big deal that only a few dozen kids get hurt a year, but that's certainly nowhere near enough justification to sanction any mechanism that may be even a precursor (as has been pointed out in other postings) to restraining the electronic means of exercising our right to freedom of speech and association.
The point I was trying to make (I realize it didn't come across very clearly) is that they are doing this all wrong. They should only have to provide a count of how many keys of each type they need and V provides them with X keys for 6 yearold males, etc. But it sounds more like they are taking the other approach and using a key with a unique id that links to a database of name age and gender.
The former would do what they seem to want without giving out unnecessary amounts of data to verisign, but the latter is VERY dangerous indeed.
What's to stop this unique ID from being used to collect all kinds of data on the children? who controlls the servers that do the authentication? if it's the school it's not so big a deal if it's some other org (especially Verisign) I'd be very wary of it's use.