MS and chatrooms

I can’t say that Microsoft’s decision to close down all their chatrooms all around the world for fear of paedophiles strikes me as particularly public-spirited. It looks more like an ethical excuse to get out of a loss-making business that’s not really going anywhere. Since they don’t charge for acce to MSN chatrooms, they have no real reason to maintai them; and their decision leaves AOL looking immoral — which can’t be a bad thing. On the other hand, Felix did tell me that there was an amazing amount of child pornography on the MS networks when he was doing tech support there. The company can’t be held responsible; indeed, he only knew about it because it was his job to shut it down, or rather to report the matter to superiors who could take action. I think that any peer-to-peer technology is going to be used like that. Closing chat rooms won’t do very much about this. My impression is that it was the discussion groups where most of the porn was organised.

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