The Microsoft Network UK has now closed all its chatrooms, to avoid child pornography and meetings with paedophiles, etc. Sensible Precaution or mad, Fascist nanny-State censorship?26 responses total.
Lito news stories on the above can be found at the following URLs: (The above line should say "Links to". lag.) http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,7496,1048627,00.html - The Guardian, left-wing UK newspaper. http://news.independent.co.uk/digital/news/story.jsp?story=446426 - The Independent, centrist UK newspaper. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3133192.stm - The BBC. You don't know who the BBC is? ;-P http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-828868,00.html - The Times (of London) - right-wing. PS. For the uniniated, leftwing=Democrats=Labour, rightwing=Republicans=Tories/Conservatives, centrist=LibDems (no major US equivalent). PPS. I tried to find some American links to this story. I couldn't find any.
I believe slashdot has a story on this.
Thanks for that: The link to the Slashdot story itself is: http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/09/24/062218.shtml?tid=109&tid=126&tid=187&t id= 95.
Corrigendum: It's not just MSN UK; according to Slashdot, MSN is shutting down *all* its unmonitored chatrooms worldwide.
That's what I heard on the radio this am too.
No, it's not shutting down the ones you pay for, but I still don't understand what the big deal is. What's the big deal.
What are they defining as a monitored chat room? This really is stupid, especially since there are plenty of other places to chat.
Not much of a big deal. Microsoft is doing its embrace and extend thing again, in the instant messenger market, again. Probably won't work.
if i remember right (from watching some news items about it), Microsoft wants to somehow control its liability on the issue. I.e., they keep the paid areas open, so if someone tries to pull a pedo stunt they have the authority to get that user's name, etc. in other words, they want to remove the pedophiles' anonymity. however, i think that even if they shut out peodphiles from their service in this manner, the pedophiles will still have other avenues.
Indeed, and the spin I got on it from the MSN UK repon BBC News yesterday morning was that they just did it to protect children, totally altruistic. Forgive me if I don't buy that line, considering who it's coming from.
The view over on The Register is that it's part of a plan to seize control of instant messaging and such.
I don't think this has anything to do with their concern for children. The reason has to be commercial. Either they wanted to close them because they weren't making money on them or something similar. Just think if google shut down google groups??? *Shudder*!!
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I think they did it for monetary reasons. MSN is a money-losing enterprise for Microsoft, and it hasn't succeeded in its original goal of killing AOL. I can't see how this will really protect children -- there's no shortage of chatrooms other places, and most of them are less well monitored than MSN's.
Everyone has to remeber that Microsoft is a control freak company all they want to do is create a large monopoly, and dominate the computer industry. They feel that they need to force people to pay, just so they can talk to other people. What they don't realize, is that as long as people are meeting people online, there are gonna be scary Pedophiles. And why do people Care about the MSN network, I mean, we should jsut skip it all together and go back to using the grex "party". :-P nobody is using it anymore!!!
Microsoft has lawyers. What a surprise. I don't think this means anything past that.
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