Linden age verification plans hit a bump

By Eric Reuters

SECOND LIFE, May 9 (Reuters) - Linden Lab’s plan to introduce an age verification system in Second Life hit a speed bump on Wednesday when it admitted it had not yet secured a verification provider.

In its initial announcement, Linden identified its verification provider as Integrity Services, a division of the technology and political consulting firm Aristotle International Inc. Linden’s blog entry has since been modified to remove references to Integrity Services, but is still available in cached form here.

“There is no contract with Linden Lab and there is not likely to be one in the next few days,” said Integrity spokesman Michael Colopy in a phone interview. “This thing is not settled.”

“There is a productive discussion in place between Linden and Aristotle,” Colopy added. “But in my experience, less than one in five productive discussions turn into contracts. There is no rational basis to assume a deal is going forwards.

Linden insisted that a deal was imminent. It announced the plan amid growing controversy from Germany, where police have launched a child pornography investigation involving Second Life.

“We’re finalizing the contract now,” said Daniel Huebner, aka Daniel Linden, the company’s director of community relations, who authored the announcement of the new age verification system.

“We expect to close very shortly,” Huebner said. “Integrity Services is our chosen provider.”

Integrity’s other clients include beer giant Anheuser-Busch, which uses Integrity’s systems to keep underage teens from accessing its Web site. Integrity’s parent company Aristotle is best known for its massive database of voters, which is sells to political campaigns and lobbying groups.

Aristotle founder John Aristotle Phillips is a former nuclear weapons scientist who designed a working bomb when he was still a Princeton undergraduate. He is the author of “Mushroom : The True Story of the A-Bomb Kid.”