Things are going to be tough for the young rebels with insatiable curiosity very soon as Identity-as-a-Service starts to catch on. The eID Connect research program conducted over 16 months by a consortium of interested parties in Karlsruhe, Germany, and has created a prototype electronic identification certificate that can catch and police any transgressions in regards to submitted age information.

The prototype has manifested in the form of a complete security infrastructure that is available in the form of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) model that is growing in popularity as life moves further into the cloud-ridden future. Subscribers will purchase access to the full architecture where they can create an online, tamper-proof identity on the OpenID server.

It’s the equivalent of wearing your drivers license on a lanyard when you go out for the night. The eIDs will have information such as your age, address, and perhaps most importantly your actual name, supplemented with new ID cards or a CM Dongle to better limit content access.

Adults reading this might be saying to themselves, “Well thank goodness I have access to everything now that I’m not a teenager,” but I would be reluctant to wipe the sweat of my brow just yet, gramps. Even though the IaaS research project was made with the specific intent of protecting the innocence of children, it will most assuredly be applied to making everyone accountable for everything their Internet personas do.

This initiative isn’t the only place this sort of authentication has popped up either. Google (News - Alert), for instance, is committed to forcing more personal forms of authentication in just accessing Chrome features.

It looks as if the proverbial railroads are finally reaching the wild west homesteads we’ve come so accustomed to here on the frontiers of the Internet. The new restrictions and laws that are intended to protect us, but also keep us from the access to things we might think we deserve but are deemed an appropriate inaudience for.