Pointless Technology

Internet Age Verification

Maybe it's taken me a bit too long to realize, but after all this is a BLOG and is therefore the perfect vehicle for driving my semi-truck of carefully tuned e-pinions into your new installed stained glass web-browser.  That or I've been watching to much Zero Punctuation and feel the need to regurgitate my technological angst in into little cascadingly styled <div> statements.  Either way, tonight's, or today's, target for verbal bludgeoning is the woefully (woah-fully?) useless and yet omnipresent "age verification" dialogs that pop-up when you are trying to watching the trailer for the latest release of the "Age of Killination" series or any movie starring Sacha Baron Cohen.  They are in fact completely pointless and startlingly under-designed, and here's why...

This gripe has been building up for a long time, like a cancerous growth on your neck that you keep telling yourself is a mosquito bite until you realize that it's the size of softball and you live in state without any mosquitos (no mom, I don't have cancer, it's a wry simile).  For some reason or another, the internet feels the need to self police its content (a joke in and of itself) by placing annoying "please enter your birth date" popups infront of trailers for games rated M for mature or as road block to the recent advent of showing "redband" trailers for movies on the unfiltered interwebs (sorry yellowband, no one likes you).  If that doesn't have you scratching your beard in wonderment (sorry ladies), this is all despite the fact that I'm next to certain that there is no governemnt mandate to do so as the industry seems fully happy to trounce retail market age verification in the federal courts to the delight of loudmouth blog commentors (...cough) and the enternal chagrin of incapable parents and Hillary Clinton.

While I fully appreciate the attempts to keep little Johnny from seing aliens being sawed in half by space marines (or ever looking into Sacha Baron Cohen's sad, lifeless eyes), what the vast purveyors of silverlight flash video players don't seem to realize is that unless little Johnny has been scared into thinking his head will explode and go straight to eternal damnation if he ever lies to an internet form, one simply has to have the math skills of a 1st grader or the ability to scroll all the way to the bottom of a list to "dupe" this amazing security mechanism.  Furthermore there are no questions asked when suddenly the oldest human being alive decides to watch a trailer for the latest Fallout 3 expansion.  One could argue that this might aid a hovering parent who can rush into the rescue and force the child to enter their true birth date, thus blocking from the content, but of course a hovering parent would have to be equally light in the brain department to even have to consider whether Johnny should be watching a trailer for Condemned 3: Age of Wood Planks with Rusty Nails in Them.

Offering a solution is what separates a critic from a whiner, and fortunately the only whine for this blogger will be consumed in crystal glasses and made in France.  I see either of two possibilities: actually decide on a standard and tag content that is 17+ so browsers can be set to block access to such content with a password protected setting that parents can enable (the infrastructure exists and some clever coder could write a plug-in for any browser) OR simply realize that what they are doing is a JOKE and save us all the hassle and do as the porn industry does by placing a large page infront of adult content that reads "THERE ARE NUDE WOMEN BEHIND THIS BUTTON.  CLICK YES TO SEE IT NOW, CLICK NO IF YOU HAVE MORAL FIBER, WHICH YOU DON'T YOU PERVERT."  Not that I would know... 

So until then, I suggest informing all videos that require age verification that you were born in 19 ot 1, and perhaps when their median age metrics drops below 80 years old, they'll get the point.  Your move, Internet.