Just announced on the Official Second Life® Blog:
The Age Verification feature (now available in beta) will be included in our release candidate today. This means that estate and parcel owners can now voluntarily flag their land if it contains adult content, and Residents can choose to access these restricted parcels by verifying that they are, in fact, adults. Age Verification is the latest of a number of tools and services to help Residents control and manage their own Second Life® experiences.
I’m a little more concerned about the issue than Colin appears to be, but since Age Verification is for the time being voluntary, I don’t intend to verify my age. And I do tend to agree with Colin that it provides a little CYA for land owners as well as Linden Lab®.
My unease has more to do with the way that personal information is mishandled by third parties than any other factor, and is not specific to Second Life® I’ve simply seen too many instances of identity theft and personal information shopping to be comfortable with the idea. Anyone interested in verifying my age can spend 10 minutes talking to me, or quiz me about the software development industry if you are still unsure 
I’ve not heard KatanaBlade or any of the other C:SI devs display any strong opinions on the subject, so while I can’t say so for sure I don’t (at this point) believe any of the C:SI sims are going to be marked as Adult Only. For that matter, I’ve not heard about any other C:SI-themed sims owned by anyone else that are planning on requiring age verification, which should be encouraging to those that don’t choose to participate.
I’m very curious how this is going to play out, and honestly hope that it turns out to be as effective and as painless as Linden Labs seems to believe it will be.
[EDIT] Reading the comments on the SL™ blog, I’m surprised (and a little disappointed) in how many people are reporting a failure of the system and are unable to verify.
Popularity: 31% [?]
Why disappointed? It will be a big bang for 5 minutes, the majority will hate it, some of those who hate it will give a voice to it, the rest will say “oh, well, you have to, well, so, we have to what to do…” and will go and verify.
I am just glad C:SI won’t be flagged mature/adult/whatever, as I don’t want to verify - and accidentally break a handful of local and EU laws and regulations.
But no worries, most of the people will just go and obediently verify with some grumbling.
I’m disappointed because I would think (even though I ought to know better by now) that before LL rolls something out on a grid-wide beta that it would actually work at least *most* of the time. I guess it’s a difference in development philosophy. I’ve been developing software professionally since ‘93, and I’m sure several of LL’s developers have been doing so that long as well, so it’s got to be more a philosophical difference than anything else.
See, my personal opinion is that Beta means “this basically works”. When I slap a “Beta” tag on something it means “I actually think this is ‘feature-complete’ and doesn’t have any severe known bugs, and I believe this because I’ve tested it as well as I am able to at this point. I know you can’t catch every bug, but I’ve done everything I can to flush out the most obvious ’showstopper’ issues”.
Linden Lab, on the other hand, appears to believe that Beta means “we’ve got a lot of code written now, and we are now ready for thousands of people to demonstrate to us how broken it is”.
Yes, I know that I’m being pissy and that LL almost surely doesn’t *actually* think that (right?). But the evidence remains that my quality bar for “Beta” and LL’s quality bar are dramatically different.
Linden Labs *does* employ developers from other parts of the world. I’ve spoken (via Voice) with a very nice Linden on the Beta grid before that I believe had a German accent, and I know from reading on the blog that they have developers who grew up in other countries as well. Surely at least one of them would have thought to test whether international citizens could verify identity? And surely at least one of them realizes that there are EU laws against handing out personally identifying information in this manner?
Yet here it is, and it’s broken. And this is not an isolated incident. It’s a systemic problem, and it’s constant.
Very disappointing, I think.
I think there’s a good possibility the Tokugawa sims will only allow age verified members. Domo apparently had an incident of child avatars having sex in his sim and now bans any child avatar on sight if they don’t change their shape, even if they just want to duel. I know that child avatars have nothing to do with age verification, but I think Domo is concerned about keeping his sims as legal as possible.
I can understand his point of view. He’s got quite an investment in those sims, and surely doesn’t need the actions of others putting that at risk. I can totally understand why he’d consider it.
It would be a real shame from my point of view, though, since I have no intention of complying with the age verification policy, and would therefore be effectively locked out.
I’m sure that I am not alone in that, and it’s possible that if enough people feel that way then the lowered traffic could put Tokugawa or any other sim whose community is as diverse as ours at risk of not being self-supporting.
It’s a bad situation for many people, and I’m really kind of bummed that people that I like and respect will be made to make that choice for lack of better alternatives.
Takuan, I agree with you on the development part - being a software developer I wish to see a company which won’t push on “more features, moremoremore”. Can’t really find much - and it’s not the developers’ choice 90% of the time.
I don’t expect any improvement in this area however.
One interesting thing is this link: http://www.gridgrind.com/?p=228
A small excerpt:
You: So then it is NOT required to flag your land adult, you do have
the option of using some other system? I want to make that
clear. I’m not talking about verifying, I’m talking about land
flagging parcels.
…
Michael Linden: You can certainly use other systems, with or without
also using “mature” flags, sure.
…
Prokofy Neva: but what is the liability for a landlord who has not
checked off land as containing graphically sexual or violent
content, and then a tenant puts out this content and is AR’d?
Will LL go after the landlord over his ownership of the land or
the tenant for ownership of the content?
Michael Linden: Neither. It’s “strongly encouraged” and “voluntary”.
One thing is sure: if little johnny can steal her mum’s credit card to get payment info, he can get mum’s driver license and verify as an adult.
Verifying that the account holder has papers of an adult does not mean the actual person sitting in front of the screen is not a minor.
“and it’s not the developers’ choice 90% of the time.”
That is absolutely true! Many times developers are forced by the suits and higher-ups in the company to release software that is not “ready for prime time”, and in fact in many cases I’ve seen the developers have to fight tooth and nail to get the Beta tag added just so that the company doesn’t try to make a release without *some* sort of “this isn’t finished, folks” disclaimer (which they are wont to do when not checked).
Thank you for reminding me of that grim reality. I had been commenting from an emotional position and had conveniently forgotten that the impedance mismatch between developers and the business managers is often so great that the business managers don’t listen to the developers even when the guys writing the code can clearly demonstrate that there is more work that needs to be done.
Like you said, I wouldn’t expect any improvement in this area either, unless there is a change in management, which is highly unlikely. The people making so-called “business decisions” rarely listen to developers when it comes to “issues in the large”, thinking themselves more qualified to shape the direction of the company than those silly little code grunts.
The problem is, those guys are no more prescient than the rest of us, and in this case are no more able to perfectly understand the total impact that this will have in the long term than you and I.