Speaking of Identity Verification – Shanda subsidiary Aurora Technology has frozen the accounts of any male players who play female characters in-game in their MMORPG King of the World. Pacific Epoch reports that "Aurora stipulates that only female gamers can play female characters in the game, and it requires gamers who chose female characters to prove their biological sex with a webcam,"

Identity checks via webcam? Not exactly hard to fake, if you have a handy female relative or neighbour around the joint. Okay, actually, trivial to fake. But imagine if Linden Lab implemented this policy. Just think of the blog comments.

Notably, there seems to be no mention of any effort to prevent female users running male characters. Now that seems a bit discriminatory and biased, if you ask me.

[via boingboing.net]

Hot on the heels of the Kokomo we-don't-really-want-to-ban-photography pseudo-photography ban, comes the news the Anshe Chung has tried to force various websites to take down pictures of her being griefed during an interview. She DOES want to ban photography if it features anything she's made or owns, it seems. Here at Second Life insider we are nothing if not topical.

I am indebted to Spin Martin for the lead on the Reuters article which outlines the story, and then to various gleeful residents who note that Anshe and her husband have been foolish enough to mess with Boing Boing in the realm of IP and copyrights issues.

It seems that Anshe has decided that she owns not only the IP for the things that she produces, but can also control the use of photographs and film which feature those items. If Anshe thinks that she can censor pictures taken in her sims, I think she is about to find out how dirty it can get.

Popcorn, anyone?