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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.""
MySpace isn't a file-sharing website is it?
It IS My Space.
All Mine.
Rupert
Who ever suggested the net was free of censorship?
Seriously.
The opposite of progress is congress
Why, again, do we care about the cesspool that is MySpace?
Wouldn't the world actually be a BETTER place if all the users revolted, and the site shut down altogether?
What the Web won't be like in 10 years? (1997)
So much for corporations being less in control at the hands of the communities.
MySpace, the personal file-sharing
Myspace is not a file-sharing site. Its one of those "Social-hub" places fat girls post blurry pictures of themselves on.
adventure-today.com
However samy is my hero.
Karma whoring
This is a perfect example of how to fight commercial censorship... vote with your wallet.
This isn't the sig you're looking for... Move along.
...belongs to those who own the presses, a fact-of-life with which I suspect Mr. Murdoch is well-acquainted.
"My Space." That's funny.
The British newspaper? How does it control MySpace? Surely you mean News Corp, the name of the parent company.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
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.
If the dot com bubble taught us anything, it's that "If it's free on the internet, it's unreliable and fully controlled by somebody who will run it into the ground". I'm costantly telling that to bands who rely on Myspace as their primary website. Very soon, Fox might, and could pull an MP3.com and just pull the plug, leaving thousands (millions?) of bands without a web presence. There also plenty of people who only communicate through myspace, and so when myspace goes, all communication ends, and they lose those friends. These kids who think they have the right to post whatever they want are sadly misinformed, but they are 12 years old (claiming to be 18 of course), so we can't blaim them for their naivety.
My Youngest son was buying his drugs ( mostly pot, at least I fucking hope ) from this site. And after hacking into his profile, tracking his so-called friends and online buddies, my wife and I deetermined that the site was mostly being used by him for getting with his drug buddies. Hell there was a kid on his buddy list and had a picture of like a poiund of pot on his bed with him in it, and it didn't look like Photoshop either. Were it not for my Oldest who uses it for what it was supposed to be, chatting and sharing vid's of his motorcyle movies and stunts, than I would just blacklist the damn thing.
As it is now, my wife spends alot of time educating parents and showing them what their kids are really up too.
Some are shocked, some don't seem to care.
But I guess the REAL PROBLEM is not the website, it's the lack of parents being involved in their kids lives.
DAMN, I hate it when I'm my own Devil's Advocate........
Anime nerd, Manga geeks, Hentai freaks, Loli Maniacs, Warez Distributors and Attention-grabbing Cam whores... I mean MySpace users rejoice :)
If I can do it, its probably not worth doing... probably
If only there were OTHER ways of posting pictures of yourself on the internet with the spots photoshopped out in the hope that some girl in Kansas will think you're hot and add her to her friends list while discussing with your bedroom-bound peer group the latest netvid of some jerk wiping out on his BMX and straddling his nuts on the crossbar while simultaneously downloading pirated copies of godawful corporate-fabricated whine rock.
Oh, the humanity! Won't somebody think of the children?
Oh, hang on...
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
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.
After the company has shown their disrepect for users, why did the users go back at all?
I wish people would hold companies' feet to fire more often. If the only "punishment" a company suffers after getting caught pulling shitty behavior is a few days of bad PR and having to revert the shittiness, then what's the incentive to not be shitty?
How many shitty things will they try next? How many shitty things have they done that don't rile the attention of users?
You know their shitty. I know their shitty. *They* know thier shitty, and don't care, as long as users keep coming back after a perfunctory, insincere sincere apology -- Until the next time they get caught doing something shitty.
Why do users let the cycle continue?
This is not just Newscorp I'm talking about. Consider Microsoft (Verizon phones), Sony (DRM Rootkit), etc. Yet people are lining up for the XBox and can't wait for the PS3.
I'm not much of a gamer, but I've got a PS2. The next gaming system I buy will be a Revolution. Why? Because I haven't heard of Nintendo being shitty to users. (I'm likely wrong, but then I'll have to find which one has the least amount of shittiness. But considering Sony and MS, Nintendo will have to be *really* shitty for me to not go with them.)
Same with RIAA. Why do people buy their stuff? I'll admit I'm a bit of a hypocrit here, because I broke down and bought my wife an RIAA-disc for christmas. (I got her severals CDs, only one of which has RIAA pawmarks on it.)
I'd like to own American Idiot, because its good music, but can't bring myself to giving any RIAA organization my money. (I made an exception for my wife's happiness.)
The only RIAA music I buy now is *used* CDs. With only three or four exceptions in the probably the past five years, I haven't been the original buyer of any RIAA-tainted CDs.
RIAA is shitty. Therefore, I don't give RIAA money. (Well, mostly. I try very hard.)
Microsoft is shitty. Therefore, I don't give Microsoft money. (Yay, Ubuntu! Yay, FSF!)
Disney is shitty. (Senator Disney? Copyright extensions?) Unfortunately, Disney has grudgingly gotten a few of my dollars because of the Disney Princess merchandise and videos -- the crack cocaine of 5-year-old daughters. What's a good alternative to this? Barbie. Is Mattel shitty? I don't know. Anything else?
The thing is, it takes a little work to be a fully informed consumer. Many corporations count on our ignorance. However, the internet improved user-to-user communication so much that it's hard for companies to hide their shittiness for long.
Now, if I could only stop my money from supporting the Bush administration without going to jail....
Software Wars
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=
As a 29-year-old MySpace user and owner of my own domain (in fact I have my own vmware server), may I be the first to invite you to shut the hell up?
You want to set up your own site on your own domain/hosting, go right ahead. Good luck getting any visitors. You want to make contact with new people, communicate with them, set up a virtual social network of people who you can later meet up with in real life, well you need something like MySpace. It's the users, stupid. Oh, and you get to discover cool new bands as well.
And another thing - is the irony of a lot of Slashdot users making fun of a lot of "12-year-old goth" MySpace users lost on everyone but me? I frequent both sites, and let me tell you, MySpace has a LOT more "normal" people on it than Slashdot.
So in summary, shut up.
You'll let one child perform motorcycle stunts and show off to his friends but you won't let your other child buy pot? Am I missing something here? I'd rather my kid smoke a joint than eat through a tube for the rest of his life. Not that I'd like my kids to do drugs, but you get my point.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
I hope people are finally Getting It that if we are to subjugate ourselves entirely to technology, if we are content to surround ourselves with gadgets and gizmos, that than perhaps it's not a good idea to leave every single last scrap of control over technology, from space stations to digital watches, in the hands of about five trillionaires worldwide. Can anybody see a problem there?
Here's the skinny - MySpace.com was originally a filesharing site, however that went defunct in 1999.
The MySpace we know today appears to have always been owned by the same people - IntermixMedia (IntermixMedia.com), who were initially called eUniverse and are to all intents and purposes a (viral) marketing company. eUniverse changed their name following accounting troubles which resulted in them being delisted from the Nasdaq, and allegations regarding spyware.
IntermixMedia was subsequently bought by News Corp. for an apparant $580m.
Exactly where the two (three, including Brad Greenspan who left around the time of the troubles with the SEC) guys who apparantly started MySpace come into it all, is at best unclear.
fortune -o