Slashdot Mirror
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."
Note that this only affects public chatrooms and not the MSN Messenger service - I say this now not because it's not obvious to those who read the article, but that because this is slashdot and people won't :)
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
All the Kids who used to chat on msn will now find "cooler" chat rooms (perhaps IRC) and they might start trying out other non Microsoft products...
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.
Its obvious that Microsoft make decisions for no other reason than to make more money. The subscription chat services make more money than unsubscribed.
The real reason for this is that the lawyers are screaming to cut the unmonitored service before they get sued.
Nevertheless, that kind of chat is among the most banal and crappy of all internet applications. If every provider stopped supporting it, it would be no great loss.
Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird -- Proverbs 1:17
"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."
Your questioning of microsofts motives clearly indicates that you have something to hide. Are you a paedophile?
We have found a nonce! may we burn him?
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.
My immediate reaction is that this will simply drive chatroom-using children to less-monitored, less well-policed chatrooms where they can carry on gossiping - especially if they don't have access to IM clients. Only nobody will be watching those chatrooms.
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.
"This is why men never share their feelings; because women always remember." -Just Shoot Me.
I just heard a discussion about this on the BBC's Radio Five Live. One concern they raised: children will not stop chatting online, but will simply switch to other chat services which are even less safe than MSN's. Not only that, but with the announcement of the impending closure, there will be a scramble to exchange contact information before the deadline, which may include phone numbers or other personal information (precisely the thing we don't want children to do).
Another point they made: when talking to your children about the dangers of talking to strangers online (or anything else, really) it's very important to explain WHY it's dangerous, and make sure they understand exactly what the dangers are and how to avoid them. Children tend to rebel against authority, especially when they can't see good reasons for the rules parents set for them.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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!*@%!
I think this consitutes the first step in a slow march towards the ban of unmonitored chat rooms. Something which is absolutely bizarre considering the fact that the chance of your child being groomed by a paedophile are probably about the same as your child being struck by lightening.. In the UK we see about three to four cases of this a year.
More children get killed in car accidents.. in fact it's the biggest killer of under 12's if i recall correctly..
Unmoderated chat is about freedom of speech. The price we pay for freedom is that evil, to some extent, is free too. A world without fear and terror is a world without freedom.
Freedoms are being removed left, right and center in the post 9/11 world. The irony is that the terrorists succeeded.. The land(s) of the free are no longer as free as they used to be.. My forefathers fought for our freedom in blood.. We shouldn't give in.. Every man killed by a terrorist is a solider for freedom.. Let's not let democracy drown at the hands of a few.
Simon
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
Guess I've been trolled, but you should lay off the 'Microsoft == evil' lines, they're getting really dull. This kind of comment is flippant, and actually pretty irresponsible. What would you do? What would you have them do? Give an answer of 'We're not people's censors' and leave it at that?
This is a perfectly understandable reaction on their part, and you will probably see similar reactions from other popular, unmonitored, visible chat providers. We can bitch about subscriber lock-in all we want, but the PR flack had an undeniable point -- subscriptions mean accountability for both the provider and recipient. When you provide a visible, accessible service like this, you have to decide if you want to allow this kind of crap on or not.
Hey, you want to see loads of junk, you can still go to IRC or read Usenet - it's your call.
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Am I the only one here to think that maybe they're actually doing this for the very reasons they quote - i.e. they're scared to death at the idea of being associated with all these net-paedophiles stuff ?
Clueless journalists are just as dangerous for MS as they are for others (note: I'm talking from the UK, homeland of such some monuments of fair, objective et reliable reporting as The Sun). They've seen those stories about paedophiles "hunting" over the internet, and they know how 'sensitive' the public is about anything related to paedophilia (Britain is also the place were angry mobs assaulted a doctor's house because they confused the word 'Paediatrician' with 'Paedophile').
This may be a much more compelling reason than locking out a few thousands 3rd party clients.
Thomas Miconi-
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.
Shutting down services is not the answer for abuse of the system by some bad elements. The dangerous aspect of this is that, So called "abuses" of chat is applicable to irc and many other applications as well. There is also abuse of the systems in these applications too. So they could use the same argument to shut down any of these . On the contray if somebody is genuinely interested in stoping the abuse , they should look for serious level of parental level cotroll. Because perception of "morality" widely varies and whats acceptable to one person may not be acceptable to others.
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
"Give an answer of 'We're not people's censors' and leave it at that?"
Yep. You say `if you`re worried about what your children might see or do online, then only let them use the net in your presence, log what they are doing, talk to them about the dangers (and don't let them use the net if they aren't old enough to understand)`.
I don't care much about this instance, as I don't use Microsoft stuff if I can avoid it, and there'll *always* be a way of discussing things online with strangers, whether the government or big business likes it or not. I don't want accountability - I want to be able to talk about what I want with who I want, which includes strangers. It's easy enough to ignore idiots, catch bots and spammers etc. If someone wants to sit and watch rooms for perverts etc then fine, do it. I don't have a problem with that.
It's not exactly hard to monitor a room and look for words relating to `phone number` or `address` or `age` or whatever.
> Am I the only one here to think that maybe they're actually doing this for the very reasons they quote
No, not at all. Here are some of the reasons Microsoft gives in the article (thru Geoff Sutton, European GM of Microsoft MSN):
""This is a decision based upon consumer experiences, child protection and OUR STRATEGIC INVESTMENT TO BUILD UP MSN MESSENGER"
"The straightforward truth of the matter is FREE unmoderated chat isn't safe"
Emphasis is mine in both quotes. But there you have it, even within the Microspeak they are admitting that its really profit/market-share driven.
That second quote looks very like their "free, open-source software isn't safe" marketing, doesn't it?
-- now where did I put that
Thus one can conclude that the problem isn't kiddy fiddlers, it's free (as in beer) kiddy fiddlers.
PS,OT, is anyone else having problems with /. headlines by email?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is nothing new. New technologies always inspire fear. When doing some research once I read an article in a magazine from around 1890 talking about how young ladies should not be allowed to use the telephone for more than a few minutes at a time due to fear that they weren't mentally strong enough to cope with the sensation of talking to a disembodied voice for very long.
In my lifetime I seen fear of video cassette recorders (remember how "video nasties" were going to corrupt a whole generation of children?) and similar fear of video games, and now all this stuff related to the internet.
The really stupid thing about all this from my point of view is how the press in the UK has caused the general public to believe that paedophilia (that is, adults that find pre-pubescent children sexually attractive) is common, when in reality it is very rare and probably no more so today than it was fifty or 100 years ago. This has caused, for instance, parents to be afraid to let their children go out to play outside. This is a real shame.
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?
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
This would be a good opportunity to turn people on to cross-platform IM clients like GAIM. I doubt anyone in the tech communities is naive enough to take the children argument as more than a red herring to keep IM from joinging the OS/Broswer/Mediaformat/Office format anti-trust action. It does, however, provide a very good cover for pushing people into MS-Passport, despite its reputation, and for locking out non-Microsoft IM clients.
Alternately, this can be seen as just another product or service being dropped or postponed as the company sheds weight to try to stay afloat.
Lastly, regarding the link. This is being covered by everyone and his dog, even Reuters, so no need to plug poor sources..
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Oh no! Now IRC will be suddenly full of immature people using some kind of weird form of English! Oh wait...
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
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.
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