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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."
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.
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?
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Excellent! I figure by about noon tomorrow I'll download a patch that "officially" makes me a 16 year old girl.
Selling his or her token to some freak on ebay!
terpmotors.com
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?
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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
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.
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?
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.
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.