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.:-)
I've run a small commercial chat application for almost 5 years and I know that when companies such as Microsoft or Yahoo close their chat services claiming to "protect the children" they are using it only as an excuse to cut either their liability or what accounting sees as a black hole.
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.
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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. :-)
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.