Topic awaiting preservation: MSN Chatrooms to close !

It looks like Microsoft are pulling the plug on their chatrooms due to misuse.

FULL STORY HERE

yeah i heard about that on the radio this morning, there are many other chatrooms in the sea though and most don't have the "power" MS has to moderate them, they could've done a better job moderating them i reckon.

Yeah I heard this on the radio early this evening. Some spokewoman said it was due to a large increase in pedophiles picking up kids and what not. As you said prawnstar69, there are MANY more chatrooms out there, but I reckon MIRC and the "Q" will be getting a fair bit of traffic though from such an action. Yes moderation of the chat rooms was absolutely shithouse, the idea of getting "bots" to do the moderation just didnt work at all. Not to mention the fact the "bots" would go "offline" during the holidays so everyone went on a riot.

I still find it funny when I got a gullible host and convinced him this 13 y.o-tryhard-hotshot-all-the-gurls-love-him kid was really a pedophile who I just had a court case with.

"You know you have been doing 3d too long when you walk into a church and think, "God, the polycount of this place must be huge!"

Yahoo doesn't do much better, i wonder if they will follow.....

Its nuts really -all they had to do was tighten up security - this way people spread ou to other chat resources where there is less monitoring.

Main article: http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,7496,1048599,00.html

also: http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,1048464,00.html

Criticism from Freeserve: http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,7496,1048599,00.html

This is important I suspect:

quote:

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MSN will continue to operate its chat rooms in America, but customers there will need to provide a credit card number and billing address before they can log on.

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from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1048421,00.html

They clearly didn't think it was worth their while doing this over here - pos. they were looking to get rid of the service anyway?

___________________
Emps

FAQs: Emperor

Well.. I suspect that it isn't their 'jurisdiction/right' to ask for that information in the UK. Or they don't have a n agreement with the UK authorities to actualy use that information for legal purposes. As you are so fond of pointing out. They can get away with things here that they can't in other places.

shutting msn down to kerb paedophiles, like yeah, that'll work. a bit like shutting down Napster to stop p2p filesharing


~We're not here for long, we're here for fun~

GD: LOL - there is no reason why they couldn't implement such a system here, esp. if they pitched it as a child safety measure, and I am amazed they haven't. I can only guess that it is a business decision largely unrelated to the problems with spammers and paedophiles - either they didn't think we Brits were up to handing over our credit card details online (which I don't really see as being an issue) or they are trying to back out of the portal game for the time being and this seemed a good excuse.

___________________
Emps

FAQs: Emperor

There is no situation in which absolute security can be assured, so long as it exists in a democratic environment. Case in point: current U.S. affairs (re: USA PATRIOT Act). "Those who sacrifice liberty for temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security."

The entire design of a chat room is based upon the cooperation of those inside it. If pedophiles are using a system to get their rocks off with children, shutting it down will solve nothing; there will always be a chat room somewhere. A message board. A collection of email addresses. A school.

The U.S. has simply become too obsessed with the protection (and consequential humiliation and desensification) of all Americans, though many acts are specifically targeted at children. One could easily say that the beaurocrats in Washington (and the poindexters in private tyrannies across this great land) are, themselves, pedophiles, though purely in an intellectual state.

"Truly, officer, I was only helping little Timmy stay safe from the bad people!"

Was a time when kids could enjoy the freedoms we afford all citizens; the chance to associate, freely, with people from all walks of life has always been of paramount importance to the U.S. Writ large. A free society has it's downfalls, naturally, but curing the disease by killing the patient has ever been a poor way to deal with issues.

Want chat rooms? Awesome, me too. Want to keep them safe for children? Who's keeping the kids & pedophiles from lying about their ages? At present, no one. Want that protection? Fork out $4/hr for someone who's in the chat room already to "moderate." Or have them do it for free--works fine here. You'll note we keep things pretty tidy here, even if some of us disappear for months at a time.

-steve

Was just listening to a radio interview with Clive Thomson (sp?) writes for "Wired" & "NY Times." His position, after talking with his buds, is that closing the chatrooms very likely has more to do with the 'spambots' than the pervs. He had more to say about the security bit but mostly he felt it was the spambots, noting in some detail that the countries hardest hit by the shutdown will be the former soviet block and central asia countries where the majority of the spamming originates.

one word: YAY!

I´m willing to bet in less than one year the chatrooms will be open again - for a little monthly fee, of course.

MSN Chat rooms are generally pants anyway, all that cyber sex and 1337 h4x0rZ who claim they're uber hackers when they can spam a room. it's just not my thing.