Microsoft Says So Long to Chatroom Pedophiles

MSN is to ditch its chatroom service next month in 28 countries as part of an effort to protect children online.

The company says it is making the move because online chat services are "increasingly being misused" by spammers and paedophiles. It is closing chatrooms throughout EMEA, much of Latin America and Asia. MSN is retaining unsupervised chatroom services in the US, Canada and Japan, but for subscribers only. In these countries, MSN sells Internet access, so it has names and account details, enabling it to patrol the chatrooms more effectively.

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Do any of you even use the MSN chatrooms? I did for a while, but they sucked.. I don't even chat any more.. but I thought it might be interesting to see how many people are really effected by this MS decision to trim the free services even more..

They already have moderators in every room kicking people out for naughty language.. racism etc... I just see this as a way for Microsoft to reduce services that are free..

And how does a spammer use a chatroom to spam? They can be booted off the network fairly quickly... another misguided attempt to hide their cheapness.

I just wish that Microsoft, after trimming these free services could save resources such as money and redirect it to making their software cheaper. Look at Office 2003 Professional. S$800++? As good as buying a new ATi Radeon 9800 PRO!

Tell me about it.. I mean they are promoting piracy by inflating prices..

They can blame the internet for piracy all they want, but if the prices were reasonable, then most people would purchase rather than download the software.

And if you think about it, does Microsoft really need to save money? I just checked the 2002 net worth in shares of Microsoft stock, $313 Billion US dollars:

Microsoft has a total of 10,700,000,000 shares outstanding, worth a total of $313,071,300,000, which is Microsoft's market capitalization. (That's $313.07 Billion.)

That is just in shares.. that doesn't include property rights, sales, buildings, property ownerships, etc...

I am sure they can afford to give away these free services for 1000 years and not hurt their profitability one iota.
:D

Look at Forbes, World's Richest Men 2003,
http://www.forbes.com/2003/02/26/billionaireland.html
Bill Gates, a Harvard Drop-out has $40.2 Billion! Warren E Buffett the 2nd in place lost to him by 10 Billion.
Its because Bill Gates is too filthy rich that people "specially" write viruses against Windows. I mean, Linux is also virus vunerable but there's seldom some big time viruses against it because everyone is happy that is FREE. Micosoft programs is so expensive and is not like they are losing money or anything. They have too much profit as you said. My friend told me about MSDN subscription and how intrested he was in it until the price had put him off, a few thousand dollars for 2 years or so. Microsoft deserves to be attacked by viruses but the problem is, we, the end-users are most affected by it. Even if Windows is not the best OS, Office 2003 is the best Office Suite around and is important for productivity in companies.

As far as I'm concerned Microsoft and any other large company that size,are always trying to line their pockets.They don't care about giving the consumer a break.Cutting chat rooms saved them millions now and millions in future law suits.I agree with them on cuttting the free service of chat rooms anyway because there was no way of pinning pedophiles down other than the paid access to MSN way.