VeriSign and a children's safety group has unveiled a new technology designed to 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.
Network security company VeriSign created the token, which is also used to verify the identity of people logging on to corporate networks.
"This doesn't guarantee everything. But at least it cuts the field down," Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., said Thursday at a Capitol Hill press conference 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.
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