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MSN Cuts Unmonitored Chatrooms Around the Globe
letxa2000 writes "According to MSNBC, Microsoft will be shutting down its unmonitored chat services in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and much of Latin America on October 14th--the day before MSN Messenger will lock out many 3rd party clients. Interestingly, the European manager of MSN is quoted as saying 'This is a decision based upon consumer experiences, child protection and our strategic investment to build up MSN Messenger.' It's starting to become clear that Microsoft is starting up the IM wars again and that the 3rd-party lockout indeed isn't so much about security as it is about marketshare."
There is a real moral panic underway in the UK about this now - and the attack is on all unmoderated "chat" - so even the development channel you use is at threat.
Personally, I think this is a good thing. It will help drive torward a interoperable standard for IM - not playing catchup with AOL and MSN "standards." Otherwise, we risk being in a situation in a few years similar to where we are with Word doucments now.
Microsoft has prepped the mainstream media that this is all about saving children from pedophile predators.
Child abuse experts were interviewed saying this actually increases the risk to children, because kids have emotional ties to their online chat friends. Now they might give mobile phone numbers and other personal data to their online friends so that they can stay in touch... and if that friend is a pedophile, he is that much closer to meeting the child.
The child abuse expert urged parents to talk to their kids about this, so the child can deal with this close down of chat rooms in a better way.
I think this is a very understandable position to take. Microsoft get lumbered with enough bad press as it is. All it takes is for one 14 year old to travel half the globe to meet a guy she was chatting to in MSN "channels" for MS to get slated for allowing this to happen.
Childrens channel moderation should not be taken lightly. Here in the UK there is a lengthy screening process for anyone who work with children, and unless MS could guarantee correctly screened moderators (screend of course in EVERY country that the channels operate) there is no way they could protect themselves from outraged public opinion.. Parents like to blame other people for not watching their children closely enough, and if a child is using a major companies message system, they have an easy target for their ire.
I personally believe any such undertaking to be ridden with obstacles, and microsoft as a "software" company are right to back away from this kind of thing
bah!*@%!
that only MSN customers can use the chat service now. This is the reason that the countries that they keep a chat service in are countries that they have MSN in. (As an ISP)
Now they know the names & credit card #'s of all the players in the chat rooms. (They actually say this in the article.) Apparently they will still have 'unmonitored' rooms, but I'd bet money that they still track specific usage.
Desperation is a stinky cologne
The European head of MSN was on the news this morning; she was singing the praises of messenger, including the highly dubious claim that "MSN Messenger is safe, because you know who you are talking to, unlike a chatroom where you can just bump into anyone". Huh ? You know who you're talking to on Messenger ? All you know is some hotmail account name; there's absolutely no guarantee that "bobby13" is indeed a 13 year old and not some drooling psychopath.
I guess AOL is happy though.
It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.
I do use one IRC channel, but it's a special one on QuakeNet for a few mates who used to play Quake 2 together - never any trouble in there.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Im using an iMac, and apples iChat program. It is only a matter of time before AOL will lock out these types of clients. Its obviously their choice to make, and my choice to disagree with. I will not download the AOL client for AIM for mac os X, because I do not want any AOL software on my computer. Personally I think open source developers should create an instant messenging protocol of their own, I would be glad to help.
What's another word for Thesaurus?
-Steve Wright
My point is not that MS can stop this kind of thing from going on - as you rightly point out, people will always be able to find ways around this kind of limit. If that means that people leave, and take the spammers and pervs with them, so much the better for Microsoft, no?
If Microsoft discovers its services are being abused and finds that it can at least control or stop that abuse from continuing, don't you think they'd want to try it? And yes, I fully realise that this argument can easily be transmuted against Linux users or anyone else MS doesn't like. But in this case, again, I have to ask: what would you do?
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
I know this is going to be modded 'redundant', but what the heck...let's sum this up:
;)
.NET eh..thingy strategy. (Preparing customers for a future where you have to pay for things that are free at the moment using some sort of subscription model)
* Obviously Microsoft is not the only chat-room 'provider' in the world. Plenty of alternatives. Some of those alternatives are potentially less safe than whatever Microsoft provides.
Most people will simply migrate to another form of chat-rooms. This will have no impact WHATSOVER on people trading porn and doing who knows what else in chatrooms.
* Microsoft is going to provide 'subscription' based chat-rooms. Some monitored(?), some unsupervised? Either way, more control and money for Micro$oft. (And probably proprietary lock-in - or an attempt at that
* A subscription based chat-room means you need a credit-card to be able to use it. Who would be stupid enough to pay for something that you can get for free? It also means -> 'goodbye anonymous internet/chat-room user' -> 'hello Mr <insert name>, please pay here'. Also fits in well with the
* A chat-room where people are registered (using their credit-card) is nice, and implies more responsible people, and possibly guarantees accountability and who knows what else, but (IMHO) the whole point and appeal of a chat-room was the anonymous access!
* The media is focusing (almost exclusively) on the 'safer for our kids' angle...yeah right.
The articles I've read seem to imply that Microsoft is the ONLY chat-room provider and that this is 'a great step forward'. Right. Whatever.
I don't use IRC by the way. I can think of many better ways to waste my time.
Verily, William Caxton was a right rogue, with his printynge-presse, a worke from ye verey hande of 7atan to spread vyle and seditious corruption against ye Church, ye Kinge and all moralitie.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Oh Hardly... I submitted this story earlier and my first take on it was MS has not suddenly developed a moral conscience, but rather they realise how much money and effort it was to keep the who shabang going. What do they care now anyways now that the previous users have signed up for MSN service with all their goodie goodie marketing profile info.
Call me a cynic but it is not like MS went into this IM stuff without a plan to handle this sort of stuff, what they did not count on was the added bad karma they generate will come back to haunt them in Hotmail spam and IM chatrooms. You wait for them to bring out new moderated chat rooms which are subscription only and trumpet that as the way forward for IM style services.
I'd love ot be proved wrong but just like other double standards MS loves employing it a wonder they don't yank chat access for their world market instead. Anyone else care to specualte on why that is?
Snuff said.
Rooster - A friend. "Anyone's friend in particular or just generally well disposed to people?"
It is a fact that adult males find teenage girls attractive... psychological studies have shown that males find girls to be in their peak of physical attractiveness from ages 14 to 24. It is more normal for males to find younger girls attractive than to find women in their 30s attractive. What is abnormal is a paedophile's focus on pre-pubescent children, which should not be confused with attraction towards pubescent 'children' - today's concept of 'children' in itself being a seriously warped one. A normal adult will only be able to find a pre-pubescent child attractive to a relatively limited degree, which is a bit different than the absolute-absense of attractiveness which society pretends is the norm.
We shouldn't have this environment where merely being alone in the same backyard as a 10y old girl is considered suspicious. I'm not able to show my cousins any affection, I'm too scared too, why should I not be able to show I care? Fathers where I live are afraid to hug their children in the streets. Fathers get yelled at for turning up at the swimming pool to pick up their children. And I can't choose the career I wanted for no other reason than a part of it involves working with children, and as a male I can not do that.
This hysteria is doing alot to hurt children, and is probably doing nothing to protect them.
Most sexual abuse of children is comitted by hetrosexuals... think about that.
One more thing for people NOT to use from MS? That sounds like a fair situation. I was tired of blocking this *rap at the various firewalls anyway.
This is obvious PR cover for them retracting a service. I hope this sets a precedent for them withdrawing altogether... I can dream.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
When I first saw the blurb for this MS child protection blurb, I was also looking at ads from this year's Computex trade show.
The two side-by-side struck an interesting contrast. On the one hand we've got MS talking about how we can't trust kids to use text chatting because they're so obsessed with sex. On the other hand we've got dozens of consumer electronics firms partnering with MS to make this the year of the camera enabled wireless devices. So, what's the deal?
If kids can't be trusted not to use the keyboards for text based sex --I mean how hard up can you get-- how are wireless cameras going to be the runaway product this year?
There seems to be a real contradition between these two lines of thought. I suspect from my own memories of childhood that the answer is: yes kida are obsessed with sex and no, the camera enabled devices are not going to sell well.
Most older adults tend to be camera shy and while kids tend to love the idea of posing for the camera, there's the definite possibility they might like too much.
First: At no time have they said the they will ensure, regulate or be responsible for the service. They are just claiming that their subscribers are not the problem it's the others.
Second: If subscriptions = accountability then I would assume that this would apply to all subscription services. So limiting users to their products and services just proves the point that their intentions has nothing to do with responsibility but with greed. I am sure that Yahoo!, AOL and all other subscription services would also like to solve the same problem.
Third: This is coming out after weeks a bag media press.
I just have a hard time believing any PR. Remember they are there to put a positive spin on the issue. If your are expecting any PR rep to com out and just say "We wish to destroy our competition therefore we will no longer support standards." you will be waiting a very long time. There is no reason why this cannot be stopped with the cooperation of all the players. Has any attempt been made to coordinate the effort? All I see is AOL doing it's thing and MS trying to weasel into another area that they can dominate.
Just my 2 cents and all the MS lovers now will moderate this as flaimbait.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
At luchtime, I was listening to Jeremy Vine's programme on Radio 2. This programme covers many current events things, and indeed the main topic of conversation was this MSN decision.
It was astounding how incredibly clueless the top brass of childrens charities were. In fact, the word "incredibly" is simply inadequate to describe their cluelessness - "breathtakingly clueless" would probably be a better description. They were praising MSN, and saying how this helped solve so many problems, as if MSN removing their chat feature would suddenly mean there's no such thing as Internet chat any more. You don't even need to know how the Internet works to know only an idiot would think this. You now have pent-up massive demand for chat rooms with no where to go - so guess what, just as if there was massive demand for $RANDOM_GOOD in the bricks and mortar world, someone else will set up to fulfil this massive chunk of unfulfilled demand.
As it happens, you only need slightly more knowledge of the Internet than a concussed bee to know that alternatives _already_ exist, starting with the granddaddy of them all, IRC. The only reason MSN Chat had the popularity it did was that it's the path of least resistance - for IRC you have to download a client, but I assume for MSN Chat everything's just provided. This unfulfilled demand will start downloading IRC clients no doubt (probably mIRC, so those who host mIRC downloads are probably in for the MSN equivalent of a Slashdotting).
This is the reason why we shouldn't let these people have _any_ sort of power to legislate or make changes to the Internet - their understanding is so incredibly inadequate, they shouldn't even be allowed to run a high street store, let alone be involved in Internet legislation.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
A few months ago, whenever I logged onto Hotmail there'd be adverts telling people to chat to strangers online. The person who made the most friends in a month would win a prize. Trouble brewing? You tell me.
Summation 2
A better translation of the MSN press release would be:
:D
"Chat rooms too expensive, scape goat for closure found."
By blaming pedophilia and advertising they can shut off the service with little user backlash.
This is roughly in line with the changes to MSN messenger taking place on Oct 15th - no non-Windows/MS clients will be allowed to connect. An exemption may be arranged for Trillian, but no Linux or BSD clients will be available. This is apparently because of "security concerns and virus risk" - although if that was what you wanted to stop you would be more sensible disconnecting all of the Windows clients from the network
Beep beep.
As much as I loathe some of Microsoft's practices, I would have preferred an organisation like them to be monitoring (young) children's chatrooms than SmallISP.com(tm). Purely from a resources standpoint, Microsoft was one of the best-equipped organisations to watch for paedophiles and other slime.
I used to work for MSN Chat, and because of the Non-Disclosure-Agreement that I signed, I have to post AC.
MSN did crap all to watch for peadophiles.
A paedophile was after a pre-teen girl on MSN Chat, I was alerted to it by the girl, and I followed it up on the MSN side of things. My immeadiate manager didn't do anything about it, he ignored it, so I went over their head and informed that managers manager. That manager also didn't do ANYTHING. I had to go up to three levels of management before they would do ANYTHING about it.
That paedophile was then monitored and had his account killed.
Another time I located an entire paedo ring operating a chat room on MSN Chat. There was about 30 paedophiles in it. I monitored the situation and reported back to MSN, who once again IGNORED the situation. So I was once again kicking and screaming with my managers at MSN Chat. In the end, they did NOTHING about it.
MSN Chat are NOT the people that you want protecting your children. Through my experience previously working at MSN Chat, they wouldn't give a damn if any kids got raped or killed.
Monitoring sounds well and good. Parents can try their best to keep their kids safe. But, parents are fallible. Case in point - 13 year old girl is out with her friends last week. Parents tell explicitely to wait for them to pick her up. She gets into a car with three older teens she didn't know and ends up dead when their car crashed.
At some point, parents have to allow their children to grow and hope they make the right decisions for themselves. Unfortunately, deciding when that's a good time is getting harder every day.
Microsoft is simply putting accountability on those that use their system. In the US, our right to freedem on speech is protected right up until the point where you commit a crime. Pedofiles and sexual predators will not be able to hide quite as well...at least not within the MSN system. I'm certainly not a proponent of Microsoft. In this case, however, they may be making the right decision for, maybe, the right reasons.
I am painfully watching my best friend go through hell because her husband thought that 13 year old girls were equal partners and able to distinguish a healthy relationship from an unhealthy one. Yes, he met the girl on the internet...in chat rooms. In the specific case where he got caught, the young lady didn't have any parental guidance (she lives with her brother..parents live overseas). And, yes, it seems he made attempts at other girls (supposedly unsuccessfully). The bugger is up for sentencing next month and will probably walk despite having plead guilty to a mere three of the hundreds of charges (the rest were dropped). Money talks. He will be probably be back on the street in 2 years at most. Will he be cured? Or, will he do it all over again? Scary thought.
Also, keep in mind, that MSN owns the facilities which run MSN. MSN is not a birth right. It is a commercial service meant to draw customers into their service. They are now marketing towards a safer environment (much like AOL's parental controls) and are seeking to attract AOL customers and regular internet users alike.
If MSN's strategy is flawed, they will lose customers and either change their plan or pricing structure. I think they realize that those who use and actually pay for the service want the perceived image of added security for their kids. People are sick of pedofiles and spammers (I lump them in the sentence because they are both scum of the earth) and welcome opportunities to curb them.
But, there's a dark side...MS has also been selected by the Dept. of Homeland security. I still have to wonder how much of this decision to provide accountability and tracking is based on the needs needs of this new client. George Orwell's "1984" was set to take place almost twenty years ago. You can only delay the inevitable.
RD
AIM is the messenger of choice for anyone not associated with MSN; isn't this just a way of marketing their online service?
They're going for the "technically inept parent who is afraid fo the internet" market.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you