Congress makes it illegal to mislead children to pornographic websites

President Bush will sign a bill tomorrow that will make it a federal felony for webmasters to use innocent words like "Barbie" or "Furby" but actually feature sexual content on their sites. Anyone who includes such misleading "words" or "images" intended to confuse a minor into viewing a possibly harmful Web site could be imprisoned for up to 20 years and fined.
The 163-page Child Protection and Safety Act ("Walsh" Act) represents the most extensive rewriting of federal laws relating to child pornography, sex offender registration and child exploitation in a decade, and includes several provisions other than the one related to misleading children to inappropriate websites. The obvious problem with enforcement, of course, is that the law has no effect on websites hosted outside the United States.

The problem of verifying someone's age online

MySpace and other sites that have experienced problems with people pretending to be older or younger than they really are have been looking for some kind of solution. So far nothing seems to be working, though there are a couple of technological solutions based on searching things like voter registration records that may hold promise. This article describes the problems and some of the possible solutions.