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Yahoo! Closes User Created Chat Rooms
karvind writes "Chatmag News reports that Yahoo! has disabled all the User-created Chat rooms. According to Yahoo's chat log page:'The ability to publish user-created chat rooms in the public Yahoo! Chat directory is currently unavailable. We are working on improvements to this service to enhance the user experience and compliance with our Terms of Service'. This may be true but Yahoo! is also facing a $10 million lawsuit that accuses it of cashing in on some disturbing chat rooms. The companies are paying huge fees for their ads to appear on Yahoo!. But many are now canceling those ads because of the report."
On the Internet? Really?
I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
I've never used a Yahoo chat before anyways. There is nothing useful about public chat rooms. Oh, and FIRST POST!
I never thought of Yahoo as the hot chat room spot. No matter how many Yahoo chats or Aol or whatever, the chat place to be will always be IRC, which they'll never shut down and probably always have the most freedom in terms of channels available and content within.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
Blah, there's always IRC or AIM chat if you still need chat rooms. Otherwise they're a waste of time. *shrug, wonders why he should be concerned*
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
I know the freedom of speech zealots will cry wolf over this but I'm very glad to see this happen. Although the room names don't imply that something illicit is going on, it would be nice if there was a way to keep kids chat rooms for kids and adult chat rooms for adults. Yahoo has been VERY lax about this in the past and it's good to see them make an effort. Even if it's being forced by a lawsuit.
My sig of choice is Marlboro
Well what did they think was going to happen? Opening up chat rooms to the public with I'm assuming very little moderation is just asking for trouble. The article says people asked to become moderators but Yahoo never responded.
I've never used Yahoo chat before. Do they have very many non user created rooms? Sounds like they just destroyed their chat service.
Yahoo Chat? Is that like slashdot?
thinks lawsuits against isps for 'profiting' from 'disturbing' news groups
Now where will all the 14 year old blonde lesbian goth chicks with piercings, and a fetish for cybering do once they clock off from work and head home to the wife and kids... .... so sad. . . soo truely sad it is....
Force of Will = Glue 'nuff said.
Well, the move Yahoo has made would be one wisely thought out. The Yahoo chatrooms have been abused not only by pornatics, but pedophiles. This move is the next step from wiping out the trash from teh internat.
They need to monitor their kid. Especially chatrooms.
Yahoo lets any A-hole create any stupid chatroom.
The only problem with Yahoo is that they don't have one single customer service email address. If they do they sure as hole don't listen NOR DO THEY EVER REPLY WITH A HUMAN REPLY EMAIL. So they could give a fuck if Al-queda had a chat room on there.
How many (total) channels were actively run on Yahoo Chat--basically, how hidden were these channels in the first place? Did Yahoo make an effort to police their chat channels, or were they neglected entirely (and thus encouraged to degrade to the point they were at)? Is Yahoo even liable for the actions of other people? Why is congress discussing MORE LAWS when obviously they're being sued so they already (may have) violated existing ones?
I seem to recall similar channels all over the fricking place when I was kid, on AOL. Why was AOL never nailed like this (or was I just too young to care/remember)?
The lawsuit by the family of one child porn victim said Yahoo! could have removed the sites, but instead chose to make money on them.
Oh. Okay. Nice big accusation at the bottom from an anonymous source and no support to follow it. Now that's inciteful writing!
Eh, it looks like the Religious Uptight learned how to astroturf.
DRM = Digitally Restricted Media. This is a viral sig, pass it on.
Yahoo! is facing a $10 million lawsuit that accuses it of cashing in on some disturbing chat rooms. The stations' investigation showed what's really going on in those rooms.
What they found: people typing words to each other. Shocking!
Great, now all the freaks and pedophiles and psycho freaks will be roaming the normal people channels.
At least when they were off in the freak places the law knew where to look for them.
Aim gun at foot, pull trigger.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
See kids, this is why you shouldn't use Yahoo, and discover IRC instead.
.. its not good for you, you know.
All this control over your speech
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Make the gobment do it!!!!!111
Yeah, right.
There are disturbing chat rooms in any chat medium that supports "rooms" as such. However, if my memory serves me right, there used to be a part in MOTD on IRC servers that said something along the lines of "IRC is an unmoderated medium"... If Yahoo is not a moderated place either - who is a judge of what is shocking and what is not? Not that i am advocating sick stuff, and not that i don't see how they (Yahoo) can give in to litigative pressure.. but still?
. there were also lots of arabic rooms that the Al Queada may have been hanging out in, I can't really be sure because most were in arabic font
God bless you sir, for being American.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
The real problem isn't that there were chat rooms like this on Yahoo! but that there are a significant number of people out there who want such rooms to exist. We humans are a filthy, disgusting lot.
How many times did they say CHILD SEX ROOMS in that report. I love how they act like the advertisments were purposely placed on those particular chat rooms.
First off, the "custom" chat rooms were only down for a few days. Of course now, they apparently have some "restriction" on them. Possibly some hacks have found ways to create "custom" rooms again, as the regular yahoo messenger does not allow it right now. Secondly, yahoo has always forced users to view one advertisement before jumping into chat room mode. So, to accuse them of using controversial chat rooms to market thier crap is a real lame ass accusation. If anything, they could be accused of not moderating thier chat rooms. However, I do believe the Yahoo Messenger software agreement limits liability for this somewhat. Besides that, though, if someone is going to chat about something "inappropriate" on the internet, they will find a way, even if that way is hopping on yahoo chat, IMing "wanna talk about codeword?" and then jumping over to third party product.
Maybe they can also get rid of the bots plaguing Mahjongg Solitare and other stuff on games.yahoo.com
Well...it was a dream.
Y!?
All Yahoo chat rooms :
joeuser: where are the ladies
joeuser2: HI R U FEM?
adbot: jargonlkjdsfhgnbfoo
adbot2: 25/f/perfect nudexxxpics.sex.ws click here for my pics!
Followed by the hammering of your desktop full of randomly generated adult website advertisments and emails. Things have gotten so bad with the bots that people are relying on 3rd party programs to block the sheer amount of crap that an average yahoo user receives every day.
I'd honestly say a good 30-40% of the "users" in the rooms are adult website advertisement bots. I've spent a few minutes on this comment and I already received at least a dozen bogus IM's / ads from them. The news about companies not wanting to deal with yahoo's obvious chat room problems doesn't suprise me in the least, I say good riddance.
there were also lots of arabic rooms that the Al Queada may have been hanging out in,
Just reading this comment from you is scary. But perhaps not scary in the way you think... It's scary that your first thought about an arabic chat room is as a possible host for "Al Quaeda". Those darned terrorsts are everywhere now, aren't they? And yet 5 years ago you never even knew they existed.
Oh, but because I suggest that perhaps arabic chat rooms are NOT somewhere for Al-Quaeda to hang out, that must make me a terrorist too...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"The lawsuit by the family of one child porn victim said Yahoo! could have removed the sites, but instead chose to make money on them."
A child porn victim? What exactly is the story behind this? Someone's family sues Yahoo! on behalf of the "child porn victim"?
Did the child provide photos to pedos on Yahoo!? What is the deal with this? And how do you sue Yahoo! for your kid (let's say...), uploading photos or video of themselves to some perv? What's even going on with this?
Sounds strange to me on it's face...
In a 'large' room frequented by at least 25+ regulars I found at any given time there was maybe 10 humans and the rest were bots.
Thankfully bots are easy enough to spot and some are amusing, I guess...I still miss the swedish bot from MSN, she was cute
Yahoo is very overwhelmed by bots, but Yelite or other clients make it a little easier to handle. In no time you too can have 1000+ bots ignored.
I find it hard to imagine a big room with 30 real folks in it and not all that many bots, but oh well...its Yahoo's problem and not mine
If I had to guess, I'd guess that Yahoo is making money off those bots somehow, but I never really felt any urge to waste any time or effort to dig deeper than speculation. Just seems like when MSN closed to the public and became members only, Yahoo spam increased many times over to what we currently have, which is near total spam goodness.
With the Yelite client, by the way, no advertising
from Yahoo is seen, so I never had a clue as to who/what companies were tied into that.
Now if it was just that easy to handle the tweekers on Yahoo...
does this mean I wont get anymore "View my webcam" IM's too :-P?!?
Sincerely,
Chadwick Ferguson
there's just too much authority and their foul language policy is just fucking absurd.
Well the only thing your foul language added to your post was the impression that you are an idiot with a low education level but other than that foul language adds nothing to a conversation so why should it hurt if they have a policy on it?
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Call me cynical but I was suprised to find out that Yahoo! had given a mere
$10,000 to the Republican National Committe, and an equal amount to the Democratice National Committe.
Personally, I suspected larger more frequent donations were required to keep the current administration paid off.
Unless, Alberto Gonzales is allowing Kiddie Porn to further his own political agenda. Personally, I hope that the current administration is just cheap. The alternative of the Bush administration not prosecuting kiddie porn because it will make a new bill easier to get passed,
Work bio at MMWD
I loved going in there and pissing off the pokemon kiddies. They always told me that they were great hackers. And I told them stuff 'like what is ram?' but they never had an idea what I was talking about.
Sorry about the off topicness... I'm tired as hell and cant think...
I remember such classic rooms as "12-14girlz and guyz chat" and "13-17 teen chat", with maybe 84% of the room's population consisting of thirty-two-year-old men living on the west coast (I used to sub7 them out of boredom just to mess with their heads). The sad thing is, even if Yahoo gets rid of those chats, there are still at least twenty-five similar chats active on AOL. The concept of eradicating Internet kiddie-porn filesharing is almost impossible to imagine, given the overwhelming number of mediums - chatrooms, "secret" forums, peer-to-peer clients, et cetera.
Yahoo chat rooms blow.
Geocities was great before the bought out and it was a big lose.
Not surprising at all...
Microsoft's media portal in australia, "ninemsn" (think msnbc) recently had to explain how it failed to notice its members had set up a "Rape Club" chatroom devoted to discussions a photos of, er, rape.
I just tried to track down a link through google news.
Which (at the moment) leads to a news article on ninemsn (!) Amusingly, follow the link and receive:
"The article you have requested does not exist"
Tinfoil hats ahoy! Instead, try this link to read about the whole sordid affair:
Nah, actually these rooms are getting closed, because the undercover law officers wasted tremendous time and effort fishing for pedophiles in it, for no good. Thing is there IS a line between reality and fiction, and in fiction people will do countless things, including butchering each other in games. But when it comes to reality, there is a little inner voice that goes off, that makes people care about each other. I wonder how many pedophiles they set up who actually treated their bait very very decently and with respect, and stopped the contact after coming to their senses. Like, look, even Michael Jackson got let off, so why waste time fishing for these people if the law will just let them go?
PS. Chatting is a bit impersonal, and because of that it can get rude. If you don't like it, flip the switch off. How many times have you seen people talk really nasty in 3rd person, but when they are face to face with someone, they shape up and behave, and become less offensive? Well in chat the "I" can talk to the "You" as if it were a "he,she,it." Webcams and voice can aid making it more personal, but it's impossible for everyone to voice-talk at the same time the same way as they can type, it'd be a mess. Of course there are two sides to every story, and the opposite is true too, when you get to know someone very well even through "impersonal" means such as letters only. Also I'm sure there were some true pedophiles that stop at nothing, caught. It's always funny when they catch a 50-year old judge or respected person about to meet a 17-year old. I always think of salmon or black widow males. Sex is a funny thing, I tell ya, but without it you wouldn't be here, nor would the little salmons.
I question the credibility of any scientist that brings it up.
There was some fucked up stuff going on there.
Actually if Al Quaeda hung out in these rooms, we should keep them open by all means. Haven't you heard they only talk in person and don't even use cell phones? We got satellites aimed at listening to these people, if they only would speak up. I mean what's better than having them type up their shit in a chat room, and then just run in through some translation program? Free intelligence anyone, without wasting arabic-speaking-undercover-precious-time?
"Yes, more legislation is required. The law has not kept up with this type of criminal activity," U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, told the Houston television station KPRC." With a nod from Gitmo Gonzales ""Short of changes in the law in Congress, we may be limited about what we can do in this area," U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said."
It's yet another shenanigan and publicity stunt by a *Texas Republican* and a Texas local TV station. I resent that the article submitter did not mention that. Not that I ever was fond of the bot-infested Yahoo chat, but the action of those US Talibans reeks of stink; we found something we didn't like on this thing, nevermind that we shouldn't have been looking for it in the first place, so we'll mess it up *ALL*, for all, and let's take a chance and excuse to legislate!
Remember that 'sexy cheerleading' legislation?! I hate those folks; buckle up for their attempts, onslaught after first step, to legislate their morality and force it upon all!
*shakes head*
Whatever happened to good ol' IRC? When nobody really cared what you did or chatted about so long as you weren't bothering the other users.
Yahoo has chat rooms associated with their yahoo groups - these are still active. They don't display ads on the way in. Group use ads when you view threads - every n items you read, you get to view (ignore) an ad.
I didn't realize that yahoo also had these ad-hoc chat rooms but that appears to be what's been shut down.
As several other posters have remarked, this kind of adult/child dialog is nothing new. Way back in the day, when CompuServe was master of the on-line universe and a 2400 baud modem was da bomb, I recall watching my 7 yo daughter chatting on-line on night. When I noticed someone say 'would it matter to you if I was a 27 yo male', I pulled the plug on her chat and permanently shut down her access to chat rooms.
While I don't condone pedophilia, PARENTS ARE OBLIGATED TO DECIDE FOR THEMSELVES HOW THEY WANT TO MANAGE THEIR CHILDREN'S ACCESS TO THE INTERNET. Please do NOT ask the government or buinesses to become the ethics police, that's MY job.
I realize it's damn near impossible, and not very healthy, to monitor your kids 24/7, but teaching your kids right and wrong is what we get paid to do - you pop one out and you get the responsibility that comes with the sex.
Even I am appalled that these chatrooms are not monitored. But, let us take this a step further by asking Pepsi and other to pull hteir ads from all News Services. After all the news services are showing Politicians lying, people being killed and mained and a cruel cruel world where bad guys sometimes win. Or are we trampling one someones rights here?
Well, on IRC you can moderate your own chat room. The downside is someone else can take over your chat room while your computers are down, unless you got allies.
:-P )
Moderating like this isn't the problem, it is creating own chat rooms at all. I suppose Yahoo! will have to require an identification of all users who open up rooms if they want to stop that. This leads to other unpleasantness, like someone getting the idea that you are responsible for what people talk in the chat rooms you opened, even if you are away on holiday( or in jail
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Maybe because they became NOT FUNNY years ago, perhaps?
Hopefully, this trend will continue to the NO-LONGER-FUNNY Korea one-liners as well. They're the same fscking joke over and over and over and over and over and over again, yet they're supposed to be funny even beyond their 5,000th iteration?
Does anyone have any legal pointers to what Yahoo! was obligated to do (if anything)? I've tried looking for info on the relevant US law or case law, but I've not seen anything.
It seems clear that Yahoo! was operating a website in a hands off fashion. Slashdot does the same, right?
I can image a court could hold Yahoo! liable for any bits they serve (ala China or France), but that sounds un-American.
The various articles mention that Yahoo! cannot be held criminally liable. Does anyone have further info?
What about USENET? There's probably tons of illegal stuff floating around on that.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
.....on the number of people out there in beat-off land who are cringing a bit at the moment?
"We herd sheep....we drive cattle...we LEAD people! Lead me...follow me...or get out of my way!" GEN George Patton
....did anyone notice that Brawny (paper towels) was listed as an advertiser along with Diet Pepsi? Fat old dudes slurping down a 64oz Big Gulp and vainly attempting to clean the keyboard post chat session...the mind boggles. Now pass the Brawny so I can can clean up the mess caused by blowing my beverage through my nose all over my monitor.
"We herd sheep....we drive cattle...we LEAD people! Lead me...follow me...or get out of my way!" GEN George Patton
ofcourse they don't hang out in araBic chat rOOMs, GOd knowS THats what thEy want you to Think. insteAd they decide to post secRet encoded messaGes on forums complETely above suspicion.
God damnit, you're absolutely right! Someone mod this fucker up!
So Big Bad Corporation is to blame because it let's users create their own chat rooms. Notice how there's pretty much nothing about those who are creating and participating in those chatrooms. Why blame pedophiles when you can blame The Coporation?
What's next? "Big Bad Corporations banking on the use of baseball bats by the mob"?
Yahoo IM and Yahoo personals have become the EXACT same as their chat rooms - just ways for the sexually perverse,incredibly strange, or overly obnoxious marketer to gain attention.
Yahoo Personals/Yahoo Profiles for instance are about 60% fake - there to be front end or link builders for XXX chat/websites
Yahoo IM has become almost unbearable to be visible with fake "bot-women" IMming me and inviting me to sex cam chats
Yahoo auctions are over 90% fake - just look at the Mac Category - I don't think there are but two out of the 45 auctions that are currently up in the Mac category that are legit.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
there's always going to be somewhere on the internet where the pedophiles of the world will prey on kids. (not that i condone it, at all...i think all pedophiles should be shot) parents should look after their kids better when it comes to time online, and frankly, kids under a certain age (maybe 17/18) should NOT be in chat rooms. either they are food for perverts or idiots that make annoyances of themselves.
i chat in a user room on yahoo, just a town local room with friends that live in my city. we get teenagers who come in, looking for sex, supposedly. whether they are for real or not, we don't know, we usually ask them to leave, as most people think it is inappropriate for someone who is 14/15 to be looking for sex on the internet.
likewise with the "dirty old men". pedophilia is frowned upon by most of the chatters. a few weeks ago there was a man who came in and started chatting up a 17 yr old girl, asking her to "show her bits on cam". this guy was in his mid 40's, and when i quizzed him on what he was doing, he thought there was absolutely nothing wrong with him asking her to do such a thing, as she was on cam anyways (mind you, she was clothed on cam, and even though he was old enough to be her father.)
what is a "safe" environment for kids to be chatting in? i don't think there really is one. there's always a danger that some sick pervert is going to be lurking around the corner. i think that young teenagers need to be aware of what is out there on the internet, just like in real life. it's all well and good to say "oh, it's only words on a screen", yes there are some people who believe that, but there are others who take it more seriously. and yes there are creeps out there. maybe they should go back and revise the "stranger danger" ethic and update it to include the online world, too.
the internet can be a mine of information, and it can be fun, too. but i think people need to be more aware and more cautious of what they are getting into, especially the younger ones. parents need to keep a more watchful eye over what their kids are doing, and i think that yahoo needs to maybe look at its criteria a little harder and tighten up the leaks that let the seedy rooms slip through the cracks.. maybe implement a system where the newly created user room names get filtered for sensitive words...
is it going to stop the kiddie fiddlers from patrolling chat by closing the user rooms? HELL NO... they'll just mingle into the main rooms. as long as there's a public chat service you're always going to get creeps.
just my 2 cents
Netcraft confirms that in the Sovient Union, only old North Koreans read duplicate first posts.
IANAL, but following this link will cause a small, unsuspecting, web server to burst into flames.
In Korea, only old people mod down NO-LONGER-FUNNY one-liners. :-P
If that's the case, the old Koreans are far more intelligent and wise than the younger crowd.
I haven't seen a complaint on the use of this before now. Lots of were/where, seem/seam, a/an etc, but never neither/nor. In Norway this is-5th grader curriculum... and most all learn a third language later on in school too (8th grade onwards). How many languages are common to learn in US schools? Is French obligatory? To not make Norwegians look holier than the rest of thou though, it seems most of us can't speak, let alone write our own language very well. Just like you guys. Guess I'm a bit old and anal-retentive, but I don't care. I like languages. Though I accept that they transgress(?) and evolve, and I may spell wrong here and there myself, some errors are true corruptions, can't be parsed with 100% correctness, and as a result won't convey the intended meaning behind the sentence. Just a tiny defense of the grammar fascists. I am one myself.
Blogs are mainly just the Geocities homepage of the 2000s.
- j-joshers
One can only assume that if a white christian kills people it is ok, while all arabs are evil.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
> > there were also lots of arabic rooms that the Al Queada may have been > > hanging out in, I can't really be sure because most were in arabic font
> God bless you sir, for being American
Is it possible to write English language stuff using the 'appearance' of (true) Arabic letters?
That would be hilarious; US intelligence going through screeds of Arabic in what they perceived to be some obscure dialect for hours on end.
Eventually, one guy holds the printout upside down and says...
"You know, if you squint at this, it kind of looks like 'Oh my God, Laura Bush is hot and she sucks me ofF LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!'"
"LOLOLOLOLOL? Doesn't make sense. Must be some fiendish Middle-eastern call to Allah before they invade God's own country. Keep working on this men!"
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Inevitably, these guys are going to come up with legislation that will be impossible to implement. Just like the library net-nanny laws, which are inevitably going to be doomed to "I thought my kid would be safe if I left him at the library for 4 hours while I did my shopping and a manicure!" lawsuits, it's not going to be possible to screen each and every room name in every language created. Especially, if like IRC, they're simply created automatically.
See if you can write a regular expression that will block all of these channels. I'll throw in some easy ones as well as some that require actually knowing the subject matter (if you don't get it, try google and ageofconsent.com):
Let's all have sex with little girls!!!1!
kome ere 2 c lil kitz
young kittens 4 men
t33nz p1><
Jelly Bracelets R us
Chilean Wife pix
tennis player porn
erotaisou na shashin (I see from other posts that yahoo supposedly supported arabic, so they'd probably have supported japanese as well, and in that case you'll have to match all possible combinations of the japanese alphabets that create that concept)
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Excuse me Mr. Smartypants, but the joke was modded down because it is not funny.
How the hell many times do you have to hear a joke until it has absolutely no comical value whatsoever? Got news for you. For the "normal" human being, it's not a whole lot -- certainly not as much as these ridiculous and unimaginative clichés are thrown out on /. on just about every damned thread that can be created!
What's really disturbing is that not only are there people who continually post those like they're freakin' works of comical genius but that there are people like you who can see something for the billionth time and (apparently) still see humourous value in it! We're not talking about the works of Mel Brooks, Eddie Murphy, or (insert favorite comedian here)!
"Oh, yeah! The Russia joke again! Oh, God! And there's the Korea joke! That's probably the millionth time I've seen both of them! Never has such a lack of imagination been so-o-o-o fscking funny! ROTFLOL! Those jokes r0x0rz!" How very sad for you.
I am like so totally a twelve year old girl and I am thinking dirty thoughts about all you middle-aged men on
And how many people can mod down a comment at one time?
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Yea google has another area to step into. Actualy google chat would be really cool. Then on to a stand alone chat app GIM with a GIM Robot that would have AdSense embeaded.
Technabyte - Read my tech news blog.
Stwarman argument, this does not change the fact that not everybody thinks the same way in what is and isn't funny, n'or will it change my opinion that if you don't like something, posting in the smartass way you did won't make things better/change things.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Chat-room paedophiles are like email viruses - it can easily be stopped but everyone is too stupid. Ok so the paedophiles shouldn't be around in the first place, but that's not the point: bad people _do_ exist and that will never ever change so its about fucking time that parents took some responsibility to stop it at their end. I see no reason why a private chat system couldn't be set up were all users are pre-screened or identified. Its very simple: to join kid-safe-chat.com parents would provide ID such as a credit card or kids could get their school to do it. The kid can then choose whatever screen name they want and the parents wont know it. Chats are monitored/logged but privacy is maintained so that parents/teachers etc can't read the logs or do any monitoring other than what they could do by simply creating their own account (otherwise your kids will just walk right around it). If anyone dodgy gets on they will know that anything they say or do on this chat system can be fully linked back to their real identity.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I know things get tiring, but there ARE people after all people, me being one of them, that sometimes never gets tired of whatever jokes and clichés are thrown around here, and that is mainy because they are more tolerable to me than the clichés thrown around by some, like the RIAA/MPAA/BSA and their blind supporters. And where the hell do you get off trying to dictate what is and what isn't "normal"? How do you determine that anyways? What is a "normal" human being?
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
We should also have the government file kitchen knives down to dull metal objects, because if we're stupid, we can manage to hurt ourselves with them. And the government knows best. Hell, why don't we just all seal ourselves up in government-regulated personal spheres that can be rolled along government-prescribed paths with only government-censored content on the government-supplied monitors.
God *damn*, how did people survive for millions of years before the United States government came along to start eliminating terrible hazards? Especially *informational* hazards? My parents said "don't get into cars with strangers". Real simple. Somehow I survived, along with hundreds of millions of Americans, stunning as the thought is. And now the government is cracking down on a bunch of middle-aged people who are acting out some sexual fetish online. Great. In George Washington's time, there wasn't the *technology* necessary to monitor and punish people who violated social norms in their private lives, and yet *somehow*, *somehow*, we survived.
You know that there are cannibalism USENET groups too? You know how many people get killed and eaten? Not bloody many; it's a lot of people engaging in some random sexual fetish that they're into.
We have statuatory rape laws. We even have soliciting-sex-from-a-minor-laws. I don't understand why such laws are insufficient, and we have to start eliminating some people's fetish roleplaying.
Tomorrow, whose fetish gets eliminated? Is it those dangerous homosexuals (I notice Texas lawmakers playing a prominent role here -- they've already managed to get adopted children taken away from their adoptive parents if the parents happen to be homosexual -- way to go, conservative Texas.)
There's a little Victorianism in us all. In the United States, we call our Victorianism "Texas".
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I know things get tiring, but there ARE people after all people, me being one of them, that sometimes never gets tired of whatever jokes and clichés are thrown around here, and that is mainy because they are more tolerable to me than the clichés thrown around by some, like the RIAA/MPAA/BSA and their blind supporters.
No one's saying that we're not tired of those either. But at least dissention regarding the *AA/BSA are more often than not restricted to those threads that are relative to those organizations. In this case the fscking Russia, Korea, GNAA, and overlord clichés get thrown into any thread possible like they're just so OMFGROTFLOLPIMP funny. (PIMP = Peeing In My Pants)
And where the hell do you get off trying to dictate what is and what isn't "normal"? How do you determine that anyways? What is a "normal" human being?
Heh heh heh. >:)
When MSN closed their chat services in 2003, where do they think all of the children and pedophiles went? The pedophiles didn't just disappear and the children certainly didn't go back to riding bicycles. All they did was shift the burden of dealing with the problem to other chat services.
If an inappropriate or illegal room appeared on my service I would certainly take action, but there exist private rooms on my service which I do not monitor for privacy reasons. Lawsuits such as the one Yahoo is facing may spell the eventual end for commercial chat services and perhaps even domestically run IRC networks. My personal thoughts on the matter are that chat services should do what they can to prevent such activity but there needs to be a clear line drawn on just what a service can be accountable for. The phone company for example cannot be held responsible for a crime that is conducted or planned over its network.
I had read about the possible lawsuit against Yahoo weeks ago. Why wait until now to do something about it? Anyone notice how this happened right after they found that guy in California with names of 36,000 (not a typo) boys in notebooks?
SYS 64738
Like ' Americans for the 2nd amendment '.. or ' people who dislike yahoo's service terms' ...
Somehow I think this is yet another case of 'but its for the children' nonsence.
Yes, i realize its a commercial company and we have no real free speech rights there. But its still somewhat concerning how people toss the concept aside. It *should* be universal.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's not the cliched one liners themselves that are funny. It's you! When you folks get so worked up about seeing the cliche one liners, we people who post them just sit and laugh at the outrage. Laugh, it's funny! ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Jason, I know this is going to be modded off topic. We've had your site listed for some time, and would like to know if it is bringing visitors to your site. Pete
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
Don't think this means yahoo is giving up sex chat. they have dozens of adult chat rooms that exist on a permanent basis.
Correction: satellites aimed at listening to everyone. If 'they' knew ahead of time who 'these people' were there would be no need for surveillance, they could just ship them to Gitmo or tag their vehicle from behind with a missile and brag about it to Newsweek. If what you say is true it scares me more than any threat from Al Quaeda, the latter posing a risk level equivalent to a meteor strike.
Yes Pete, I've seen your site pop up on our referral logs. Thank you for the inclusion on your site and congratulations on surviving the slashdot effect. :-)
1. The ads are generated regardless of any chat room. Anyone who uses any chat room will be subject to these ads: its in the code. Their system was not designed to filter out "suspect rooms" from advertising. That said, they were lazy in not policing for something that would be a liability as it is now.
2. The Slashdot article linked to a story on WFTV here in Orlando. They're a Sinclair station: they got squeamish about airing "Saving Private Ryan;" they ran a lot of ads for Bush last election; and when the hurricanes came through, their weatherman got dumped on for freaking out too much ("Scary Terry"). The story doesn't even give the explanation I just gave about the ads: just rants about how Yahoo backs porn.
The BS filtered version: Yahoo is indirectly profiting on porn by being lazy with their ad system.
Life is irony, and nothing ever goes as planned.
The intent of my wording was exactally what the constitution would have been designed to protect:
"American citizens, protesting the destruction of the 2nd amendment by the government"
As a side note, the excerpt '..or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..' clearly states we do have the right of free speech as an individual.. The directive that congress is not supposed to abridge it, means we do have it..
The key to a lot of the constition is paying attention 'or', not 'and'.. Rights, in general, are not mutually exclusive, nor modified..
( but i know, we are getting somewhat OT here.. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Will this scenario happen? No. Congress is way too egotistical to ask for help and way too dependent on back-handers and voter lobby groups to do anything that might offend them, no matter how necessary.
Should this scenario happen? I can't think of any other way to produce laws that could actually work in practice, as those in Congress don't have the knowledge or skills required to understand these types of problem.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Did you lose anyone you knew in the recent tsunami? Likely not. Did you care about the event?
Bra-vo. .. *clap*
Well, regardless of whether 12 year old girls really do or don't visit these types of chat rooms - I think the real issue comes down to advertisers unwittingly having their products tied to rooms with these titles.
As far as I'm concerned, there's really no point or value in trying to make it crime to have such a chat room. Anyone, at any time, can create a "chat room" using one of the instant messenger programs out there, give it this type of "topic" and invite random people to join. Same goes for IRC, where anyone could throw a server online and make any channels they want on it - even if you somehow banned them from using the most well-known/populated IRC servers.
If you don't want your pre-teen chatting with creepy older guys who want sex with them, then a little *education* and *parenting* is in order. Legislation won't substitute.
But there IS a very real and understandable complaint when you, as an advertiser, pay your money for product placement and then your product ends up being placed where you never agreed to the placement at all in your contract.
Your local telephone company has been racking up money from lewd conversations, pedophilia and and terrorist plots!
It it true - people have been picking up the phone for years and saying just about anything to the party on the other end, which may include attempts to lure young girls into illicit behavior, planning terrorist plots and criminal activity. And the phone company has been making a profit by turning a blind eye to this for years!
I demand immediately that the phone company put filters in place to filter out any illegal or immoral conversation. Write your local politician today!
My rights don't need management.
There was a typo in your secret message, I'm not sure what to do.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Possible new Slashdot moderation categories:
Yahoo is doing SOMETHING about all the garbage in those chat rooms. I have never been able to go into yahoo chats without being inundated by porn bots and other filth. Now id they would just find a way to end the bots life could be better
Talking to Geeks is like eating jello with a chainsaw, interesting, but painful.
You just got on my friends list. Should you be proud of that? Interesting question.
The problem with moderation is that if you let users create moderated rooms there has to be a hierarchy of authority, and that is coming from the perspective of the mod. Assuming the room creator is the mod, he's not going to kick anybody out of his chat room except people who find it offensive and complain about it. Assuming it's people that Y! pays or allows to moderate, I don't think the situation would be much different from how it is now that the rooms are shut down, except they probably would've only shut down the questionable ones. With an objective mod system it would be more like AOL's TOS violation reporting. However, maybe they could adopt something like what /. has where moderators get meta-moderated. Again though, it goes back to an objective measure of what is acceptable and what is not, but that could be difficult in a situation where creating a chat room happens instantaneously, rather than waiting to be approved by an editor like around here. Now I'm having flashbacks to AOL.. bah.
As for Y!'s chat room service in general, I never thought it was that great, but probably the best use I ever saw of it was people using the audio-chat to take turns DJing their favorite music to the room.
What's even more disturbing is that someone is giving you mod points
- your posts are uninformed
- your posts have poor grammar & spelling
- your sentences are incoherent
but i know, we are getting somewhat OT here..
No we aren't - you are - this case is somewhat about 1st ammendment rights - somehow MODS think you have a point by talking about the "right to bear arms" ammendment. Now that's offtopic!
It's really hard to type when you've got one hand on your cock and the other hand doing mousing AND typing.
Maybe. I just find it hard to imagine that the citd chatroom "Girls 13 And Under For Older Guys" actually has any real women, let alone girls, in it, aside from perhaps (older) hookers and female FBI agents.
"Men into FBI agents, sign in here"
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Well, they still haven't adequately cracked down on the KKK, have they?
Me (Blog)
... are just like the Iranian mullahs. Can't handle of content flow, so they try to ban it.
If you don't like something, ignore it, turn it off, don't pay for it. But try to criminalize things you find weird? Fit for the thugs of Tehran.
-Dan tdaxp
About two years ago, yahoo took heat from it's yahoo groups server about all of the sex related groups that could be easily found and subscribed to via it's groups search engine.
:)
So what they did was simply remove any sex-related groups from the search. Try it. Type baseball, and you'll get dozens of results. Try playboy and you won't find one group.
However, the groups still do exist. You can use non-yahoo sites like adultgroupfinder.com to find them. Yahoo's pretty good at killing off any group that has teen stuff, but there are literally thousands of sex related yahoo groups.
A couple of weeks ago, yahoo removed all chatroom with teen related words, then removed all picture trading rooms.
I guess that wasn't enough. Now only the generic named chatrooms exist, causing some chaos. You now get the people interested in mmf with chatrooms that are only interested in mm or ff.
Every stupid chat room on Yahoo is populated by marketing bots that constantly IM you for porn ads. Very annoying.
So I never used Y! chat. Ever. I clicked on GAIM's chatroom option...
And within 5 minutes, I got spam.
Mein Gott. People put up with this shit?
--
BMO
...unless it actually starts costing them money or jail time. They only pulled the plug because their advertisers started pulling the plug. Until this got notices, they were laissez-faire to the point of stupidity. Now they come down all "violation of terms of service", "have to comply with our advertisers' contracts". They're just another media conglomerate that will use as much sex as they can get away with to sell ad space. They just need to redefine what they can "get away with".
We are the 198 proof..
The Slashdot Guide to Universe says that if you are a pervert and you find a 12 year old girl online, you can chat with her for about thirty seconds before being caught out. However it goes on to say that what with
the internet being the mind boggling size it is the chances of meeting an actual 12 year old girl and not being caught out within 30 seconds is two to
the power of two hundred and sixty-seven thousand seven hundred
and nine to one against.
By a totally staggering coincidence that is also the telephone
number of the last 12 year old girl who actually signed onto a pedophile chat room six years ago. She was a very nice girl whom the pedophile totally failed to get off
with - she watched as her policeman father arrested the pedophile.
--
Apoligies to Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker's fame.
It's a friggin ROOM NAME, not an admission of some act! Read it any way you want!
Step a) Stick an ad in the paper advertising that underage females can come to your private club for "underage girls looking for older men"
Step b) Set your watch after it gets published
step c) Wait for the cops to show up at your door
Sorry, but a lot of things can go past the point of implication. Sure you can obfuscate things or claim misinterpretation but quite often the intent is pretty obvious.
Yahoo private chat rooms are NOT closed down.
I repeat, Yahoo private chat rooms are NOT closed down.
They've just been removed from the public directory, making it hard to find them. If you belong to an email list or Yahoo group, and want a chat room, go ahead and create it, and tell your friends to join any public Yahoo chat room and then type "/join YOUR GROUP NAME."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I bet if they get him to admit what he did, they'll find the more popular codes refer to legal things, like looking, touching a boy in a legal manner, getting to know his mom, etc. etc.
Some of the codes may be merely descriptive, like "short" "tall" etc.
The cops say there are lots of duplicate entries, and that the number of unique boys is in the 3 or 4 digit range.
My guess is when all is said and done, you'll find a few dozen to a few hundred unique victims of illegal activity involving minors. He's also guilty of numerous counts of failing to register as a sex offender, illegal use of an alias, and possibly probation violations, among other crimes. Even if no child-victim comes forward, they'll be able to keep him in jail for quite some time on those charges.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
* 9-17-Year-Olds Wantin' Sex
* Younger Girls 4 Older Guys
* Girls 13 And Under For Older Guys
* Girls 13 And Up For Much Older Man
* Girls 8 to 13 Watch Boys (In A Particular Sex Act)
The station found all of those rooms listed as education chat rooms...
I assume the article means the "Schools and Education" category, which is NOT under the Adult umbrella-category.
I have no problem if groups like these are in areas off-limites to minors. I mean, what's it to you or me or anyone else if some 30 year old guy living in his mother's basement gets his rocks off pretending to be a 13 year old girl chatting with another guy who knows or should know he's talking to a fake 13 year old girl who is probably another 30 year old man living in his mother's basement?
Kudos to me for refuting straw-man arguments. Yay!
I think someone at yahoo likes running
#/usr/local/bin/shoot --victim=self --target=foot
They keep this up and their precious advertisers will be advertising only to bots.
Oh wait, that's no different than it was last month.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The law just lets them go? Check out the convictions, my friend.