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MySpace Users Revolt Against Murdoch
arclightfire writes "Looks like Murdoch's News International have stired up a revolt within users of the MySpace file-sharing site they purchased for $629m (£355m) last July, reports the Independent; "Angry members of MySpace, the personal file-sharing website for young adults, are accusing Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation of censoring their postings and blocking their access to rival sites. The 38 million subscribers to MySpace...discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens. The intervention by News Corp in the traditionally open-access world of the web - in particular the alteration of personal user profiles - provoked a storm of angry posts...The protests gathered pace, and when 600 MySpace customers complained and a campaign began to boycott the site and relocate to rival sites such as Friendster, Linkedin, revver.com and Facebook.com, News Corp relented and restored the links.""
This is more common than one might think. I'm not surprised that nobody noticed the same thing going on with Yahoo Messenger. It took me months for my friends and I to notice that Imageshack and Friendster links, among others, were being censored whenever we would try to send links to each other. It makes me wonder who else has been doing it behind our backs. Hopefully, the companies that have gone unnoticed will stop doing this, now that they can see what could happen.
Trust issues aside, maybe it's time to teach your son about encryption and the stupidity of using a public forum for buying illegal drugs.
I'm being serious here.
Regardless of your disapproval for such a thing, regardless of whether or not he will stop because of your wishes, he has to learn to be a little more discreet, a criminal record is something you wouldn't want your son to experience as it can hamper him in his future job opportunities and across the border travel.
If you can hack into his account and see exactly what goes on with his other buddies, don't think that it's difficult for that same kid to get arrested for having a picture of a pound of weed, have his computer confiscated, and then have the police go through his conversations with his other friends who'll he will easily rat out for a slap on the wrist.
I hate to point this out... actually, I don't really mind pointing it out, but Myspace is nothing but a free "make your own crappy website where your friends make their crappy website" hosting places. All they do is make a haven for teenagers and child molesters to make as many "friends" as possible on their web pages for no charge. By providing an over-simplified interface to make as many nasty websites as possible so the friends of their users will look and generate more advertising money.
Out of the free use, I'd say these people can pretty much enforce whatever they want on their space. If they don't want any racist sites, they can filter out as many sites by Aryans and Black Panthers as they want to maintain this. Extend this as far as they can into things like revenue generators. They get a check from Coke, so the word Pepsi isn't allowed in virtual ads on the individual pages. They get paid by file sharing company A, they're not going to allow file sharing company B into their pages.
Nothing's free, these people offer a server and maintain complete control over content.
Now if only I could get my daughter off the damn thing, I'd be happy.
Evil Walrus >83=