SEX, BOMBS & BURGERS

Last week I sat down with Andrew Nash, senior director of identity services for PayPal, and chatted about online security. Nash was in town to give a speech at SecTor, the Canadian equivalent of DefCon, which is essentially an annual hacker convention held in Las Vegas.

PayPal, if you don't know, is an online payment option used primarily by eBay users, but it's also starting to pop up on other e-commerce websites. Dell Computer, La Senza and Henry's camera stores are just a few of the online retailers that are using PayPal, which is owned by eBay.

We talked mainly about the company's plan to get web surfers onto a "single-user identity," which would eliminate the 25 or so multiple logins and passwords the typical person has to remember. Details of that part of the conversation can be found here in my CBC story.

At the end of the chat, we discussed adult websites and how a company like PayPal figures in. Part of that single-user identity plan would include age verification, which is of course a major problem with porn on the internet. While in the early days of the web, many porn sites required users to sign up for a paid age verification service, nowadays it's the Wild West out there. Accessing hard-core porn content is as simple as clicking a button that assures you're actually over 18. It's hardly an accurate system.

Here's what Nash had to say about PayPal, age verification and adult sites:



Oh yeah, by the way - I didn't have any luck finding one of those hot-dog vending machines. It looks like they're only deployed for big conventions. SecTor apparently doesn't warrant any robot food dispensers yet.