How utterly worthless... (Age Verification Implementation)

Well, I have been doing some testing of the new age verification parcel and estate flagging, and so far, it's uterly worthless. Even if you were to accept that the verification provider was staffed by saints and their service was flawless, what you can actually DO with verified info to restrict access is a sick joke.

You can prevent access to a sim or parcel only to 50 M above the terrain. Period. And the area to be controlled can't also be controlled by any sort of group access list or "Buy Pass" access. It has to be wide-open. The only additional restrictions you can place on an age-locked area is to ban those with no payment info submitted (also effective only to 50 M). And even for that patheticly limited 50M above the terrain layer, they can fly above that 50 M level, or can stand outside the parcel/sim edges, and can do whatever they like, including camming in and seeing everything and buying from vendors there.

In short... the only thing it is good for is keeping an unverified person from jumping on the poseballs in your bedroom in a house that is firmly on the ground.

Can't use it to protect a skybox.

Can't use it to protect a pay-for-access venue.

Can't use it to ensure that people who are members of a larger and more diverse group are also verified adults. (Example: Not all members of the Elks Club are old enough to be served in the bar - some are family members. But all can go to the Elks bowling alley.)

Can't use it on an off-the-map sim to ensure that people who are members of the allowed access groups are also verified adults.

Can't check with a security script and eject them at higher altitudes, or from defined areas within a larger parcel.

Pathetic!

I submitted several JIRA reports about these limitations, and they were all shut down, with the official Linden response being that if yuo have any sort of access control list in place, you must already KNOW that all those people are over 18. And how are we supposed to check that, when age verification status isn't even visible in YOUR OWN profile? The only way to check is to split off a 4M x 4M parcel, age restrict it, and insist the person has to demonstrate that they can step into the access-controlled "lie detector stand".

In England as in many other countries now, smoking is illegal in public areas, in the blog it states:

"We are pursuing age verification in a good faith attempt to comply with international laws, and after discussions with numerous governmental agencies across Europe, North America, and Asia. In some cases, these governments have publicized their views quite widely."

So one would assume that soon, parcels be flagged smoking and non-smoking areas?

Oh that could be the smoking zone, have a quick fag before you enter kind of thing

Can't we trim down the posts on this subject so the thread stays together? That way, we might get some more varied threads going instead of the same thing over and over again. Not having at go at the OP ... but so fed up of the same things over and over.

As soon as you can show me how you can smoke in Second Life.

I'm sorry, did you mean "make a picture of somebody smoking"?

Well, I am trying to discuss the actual implementation, and not the merits of the age verification provider and all that. No one thus far has openly discussed how severely limited the use of the flagged areas is. Some people seem to think flagging a parcel will magically prevent people outside from seeing inside, if they are unverified. And it certainly does not. Some people think it will keep an unverified person out to 768 Meters, or that it will keep them out of an age-locked private sim. It does NOT.

Heck, my castle has a basement, so 50 M from terrain level isn't even high enough to protect my bedroom on the top floor!

Thanks for the information, Ceera. Do you know whether teleport invites or landmarks are affected by this?

For example, if I'm in a skybox on an adult-restricted sim can I teleport this person in? Or if I gave an unverified person a landmark to 51m in the sky, would they be able to follow it? (Basically, I'm wondering if being a private sim offers any additional protection since you can't sneak in over the borders like you can on the mainland.)

well, i knew this verification thing was going to be a fiasco.
add all this with the easy-to-rort verification process and its quite evident this is a pretty useless endeavour.

They are completely unaffected by the access ban at altitudes greater than 50 M above the terrain, so yes, a LM or a TP invite to a skybox would be unaffected. I took an unverified alt and danced on a prim 51 M above the terrain of an age-locked parcel.

Not certain about locking a whole sim and trying to TP to it yourself or being invited. I can check later today.

I do know that if they are in a group that owns a parcel, they can still access the age-locked area even if not age verified. I initially split off a test parcel from my group-owned home parcel. So the new parcel was still group owned. After locking, the test alt, who was part of the group that owned the parcel, could freely access the locked area. Even though the test parcel had no explicit group access permissions. I had to buy the parcel from the group to make it ban him from the test area.

Good observations, Ceera. Although from my perspective, the indentity verification process is so easily gamed that even if all those things you list were "fixed" it would still mean absolutely nothing insofar as keeping minors out of particular areas.

I will not verify. Age restriction laws are, of course, a means of slapping a number on something largely unmeasurable: intellectual/emotional maturity. The best way to measure that in a virtual context is through conversation, because although it is possible to pretend a lot of things, it is not possible to pretend to be intelligent and mature... at least not for long.

Some people argue that LL's scheme is not really about protecting minors, but about protecting themselves and sim owners who use it from lawsuit. But is it not evident, even now, before it is put into place, that this implementation is so widely known to be flawed that it won't even provide any sort of lawsuit protection? We know it is a sieve. Can we really expect protection from the rain if we put it in an open window? It isn't due diligence. It is too stupid to be considered anything even remotely resembling due diligence. It is, and always has been, a marketing exercise.

Not Verifying
Not Bluffing

Oh dear

By far the worst part of this? In most cases, a country's government won't care about what areas of an SL sim you could access. After all, someone who accessed an illegal pornography site, and was seen on the internet log to have downloaded the pornographic images in question, but then tried to say in their defence that "They were there but it didn't let me actually look at them", probably wouldn't get very far.

Thanks. When you post your test results, please also summarize the results of all your tests to date. With bullet points, or a table, or something.

Yes and a 3ring binder would be nice.

Liome will not be a restricted sim. I ran an ad yesterday that said "Canadians welcome on Liome".

LOL. Beautiful!!




I would be sad if you are considering turning the flag on. You state in your estates blog that you will leave the rental parcels up to the renters. Is this still the case?

Well then, they'd better completely eliminate open enrollment groups. How can we KNOW everyone in the group is verified or "old enough" if any AV that finds the group on search can join?

I know hon, that's why I wasn't having a go at you. It will degenerate into the same argument tho.

Thing I find bizarre is, why introduce the verification without the implementation? That having been said maybe the problems on the grid are related to work being done to make it so.

This is why I am staying in the sky, having said that. For some reason no access rights seems to mean no entry to my lot even at that height (something is borked which I hope doesn't get fixed).

If restrictions still work like before it should be okies for a full private sim?

In the estate settings: Allow Public Access & Restrict to Age verified adults

On the parcel access tab: Allow Group Access and/or Sell passes

Parcel access shouldn't override estate access so group members who aren't age verified should be locked out of the sim and anyone who isn't part of the group will be locked out of the parcel(s) which blocks them from being able to tp as well?

Well, what it amounts to is that an open-enrollment group can't safely be used for access control to an age-verification-required area.

Thank you for performing these tests, Ceera. I was of the opinion that the parcel by parcel system was going to be mostly useless. An unverified person could simply stand on the next parcel over and manipulate the camera view and use chat as normal.

With a 50 meter above ground max limit, and the default minimum camera range of 64 meters, we have a totally useless implementation. They don't even have to stand on the next parcel, they can stand on _your_ parcel and cam in to watch videos, strippers, or whatever.

I was of the opinion before, and still am, that blocking access to an entire continent and/or block of islands would be the minimum for this to be effective. That means they don't show on the map/teleports fail, etc. so you cant go there at all if you are not verified.

This is in effect creating a new adult grid, just without a separate login like we have between the current teen and adult grids. I will leave aside the questions of whether that would be a good idea or not.

The current beta implementation is so utterly trivial to work around, I don't see how any reasonable person (ie defendant or juror in a court case) could believe it "keeps out minors". Thus it fails to protect Linden Labs or landowners, which was the whole point, was it not?

Right now, I am not alt all sure that a setting of "Allow Public Access & Restrict to Age verified adults" at the estate level will do anything more than prevent the person from teleporting into the sim below a height of 50 M above the sim's terrain. That is one thing I plan to test. If a sim is set that way, what happens if they TP to a skybox there? Do they still get in?

My earlier test with group-owned land implies that if you're part of the group that owns the land and has access to group-owned land in that sim, this overrides any age check requirement. And that was what the Linden who closed my JIRA posts said as well. Being in any defined access group, at the estate or sim level, trumps access control age verification.

I live in a sim that is NOT public access. It's split into 5 parcels. One parcel, at the center of the sim, is a 'commons' area and is unrestricted. The other 4 are private residential parcels that require you to be in one of the 4 groups that have access to the Estate at the Estate level. So someone who is a guest of my estate does not instantly have free access to the other three residential parcels.

Adding in age verification as you propose would mean that the central commons would be wide open to attack by griefers and to traffic from anyone and everyone, though presumably only if age-verified. Still, it would be a FAR larger group of people than can get there now. It would, at the very least, mean that any age-verified person on the grid could come to the Commons and cam in to all the residential parcels in the sim.

It would be nice if I could add the age-check as an *additional* requirement for my parcel, without forcing it on everyone else in the sim. Then I wouldn't have to worry that some casual guest that my Partner or I brings home for a tour of my building work there might be under aged. I know I am careful as to who I invite, and doubly so with anyone that I do XXX RP with. But I don't know half the people my Partner has added to the list. And any of them, once invited, could come back without notice.

Depressingly, my experience of lawyers is that they tend to concentrate solely on the factors that they want to use in building up their case. I think if a case came to court, they would argue that the system was best effort at the very least and very effective at most.
They will point out ad nauseum that the child had lied on signup and had also submitted bogus data for verification.
The other side will point out all the flaws and the fact that all of them were clearly and repeatedly described to LL on their own blog and fora.
After the landsharks have performed their song and dance, there would be a settlement/judgement.
Aristotle have already estimated the chances and the costs and will pay up.

Insurance companies expect to have to pay out on claims.
Aristotle expect to have to have to pay out on suits. That's the whole point of the business. They need suits to happen in order to scare potential customers into signing up for their services.

If the costs got totally out of control, I suppose that Aristotle could possibly claim that LL never specifically informed them them that the system only locked out the unverified up to 50m and only in certain circumstances. Perhaps they could also claim that LL never specifically informed them that it was possible to view content within a restricted area from outside the area.

I don't know (but doubt) if Aristotle would cover LL in a case where an unverified minor has accessed restricted material from outside of a restricted parcel.

The logical end is that verification should become mandatory for all residents.
We'd still have as many minors and griefers on the Grid as we have now.
The only difference is that the user base would be a better fit into the insurance scheme.



It doesn't really matter to them if the system is actually ineffective for 'child protection'. It's just a PR stunt and a damage limitation exercise.

Based on the OP's desciption of how this works, those who are not age verified who come to a restricted parcel should see nothing but dark/blackness. They should also not be able to click on anything within the blackened parcel. They need to add code for this in the viewers or something; hopefully it wont turn out to be a nightmare for everyone.

The code can't be in the viewer. The viewer is open source, and there are already a few custom implementations floating around. The change has to be made at the server level to have any reliable effect.

I wonder what 3ring will have to say about that?
Sniffle...would you take Germans, too? I have yet to meet any German who had been able to age verify.... (I don't need a house or anything, I got my own, but I love to crash the hang glider! )

I think all this age verifying thing is smoke and mirrors anyway. And I doubt a lot of people would actually use it, after all the things Ceera listed that make it useless...

I don't know, but I posted that with her in mind. I miss her positive presence on this forum.