AgeLock goes live

AgeLock is a resident created alternative to the Integrity/Aristotle/Linden Lab identity verification plan.

Check it out at http://www.agelock.net/ or see a demo in world at secondlife://sala/241/207/24/

I looked at the website, and (for other readers) what this appears to be is simply a scripted object that poses a "This area contains adult content, are you an adult? If so, please enter your RL age" query, records the avatar's answers in a database, and next time they show up allows adults to enter without query.

I'm puzzled. Question to the developers: what are your plans/hopes for this product? Are you advancing it as an alternative to LL's verification? If so, how are you thinking of getting LL's attention, given that they already have a plan and have gone through the trouble of creating a corporate partnership with aristotle/integrity?

When LL fully implements their age verification system, won't your system have little utility? It offers no protection, since if a landowner with content requiring verification does not restrict to verified residents, they can be AR'd/investigated and presumably shut down.

Or are you thinking owners of mature/nonrestricted content would use this?

Those are very good questions Nika.

What it does is exactly what adult websites all over the internet have been doing for years. It simply warns the visitor that there is the possibility that adult content my be present, warns the visitor that they must be of legal age to enter, and asks the visitor to state that they are of legal age and are accepting responsibility for the decision to view adult content.

For the record, this does not prevent anyone from lying about their age, and does not actually check the validity of any statements. It isn't necessary to do so. Basically the idea is to remove the "innocent victim" argument.

Linden Lab has not made flagging land as "adult" mandatory. For the time being they have stated only that it is "recommended". Verifying your identity through Integrity or flagging your land as adult is not a requirement at the moment and we haven't been given an indication that it will be requirement, only a recommendation.

It is our hope that if Linden Lab sees that the users have come up with our own solutions, they will respect that and continue to allow us to choose for ourselves which systems we prefer to use.

The idea here is that this is a mature, adult solution. If you arrive on land that contains adult content and you are immediately warned that the area contains adult content and offered the choice to either stay or leave, why would anyone abuse report the land owner? You were warned, you chose to hit the "enter" button and stay. You can't then say you were surprised by the adult content later.

This warning in our opinions is much more effective than a system in which you have to give complete strangers your personal real life information.

Does it do multiple languages?

Not yet, it's currently in beta testing, but that is one of the goals at a later date.

I like it Allana. It puts the responsibility back on the person behind the Avatar and not pass it on to someone else.

Ageblock's info request is reasonable; simply asks the resident to certify that they are of age to view mature content and they understand they're entering an area that features it. It's not fraud-proof, but neither is Integrity's system, which simply demands more sensitive data from the honest.

I'd like to rely on this, but I've got two problems with this already. First, the channel doesn't time out on a couple dialogs, so a user could hit 'Ignore' on some dialogs and effectively leave it hanging without getting booted. Second, I'm trying to use this to cover a sim that's broken into 5 parcels, and it only boots the user to an adjacent parcel instead of completely out of the sim. Will this be modified on later versions?

It's a good try.

However, I'm worried that this (and all the other adult content websites out there that simply ask for an affirmation) are no longer protected, given the piece I saw today on the new SAFE act.

In fact, LL's age verification system, draconian as it is, does not meet the requirements of this new anti-child-pornography law.

This is what I heard from the NCSF. If this is the case, then why aren't LL loading their guns to challenge it? They've already got connections with the EFF, why do WE have to be the ones to get EFF to light a fire under their asses?

EDIT: Actually, I take that back. I'm looking at the summaries of the 2007 update, and I see a lot of new penalties for child exploitation and pornography, but none that define a 'exploited child' as one who goes to great length to look for trouble and so happens to find it.