VeriSign Touts Childrens' Online Identity Token

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - VeriSign Inc. (VRSN.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and a children's safety group unveiled a new technology on Thursday that they said would make it easier for children to avoid child predators online.
The i-Stik token, inserted in a computer's USB port, provides verification of a child's age and gender. Chatroom lurkers who can't prove their age will stick out like sore thumbs as more kids adopt the tokens, backers said.

"This doesn't guarantee everything, but at least it cuts the field down," said Montana Republican Sen. Conrad Burns at a Capitol Hill press conference that was attended by several other lawmakers.

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.

The program will be expanded to thousands of schools across the country starting in the spring of 2005, said Teri Schroeder, president of the children's' online safety group i-Safe America.

The token, made by VeriSign, is also used to verify the identity of people logging on to corporate networks.

< This may be a step in the right direction... It's better to fetter the smaller group (if necessary), which is the children, than the larger group which has greater need for privacy and freedom. Also overall this will allow the annihilation of censorship on the net. If you're there Without a token it can be assumed you're an adult and can see whatever you damned well please. Not that we need to censor kid's eyeballs anyway. That's the parents job and they go too far anyway. >