Tech News

MSN to close chat rooms. CNN article.

LONDON, England (CNN) — Microsoft says it will drop chat room services in 28 countries next month, in a move it says will ward off pedophiles and junk e-mailers.

In a statement, the Redmond, Washington-based software giant said it made the decision following the growing abuse of the Internet, particularly in unsupervised, anonymous chat rooms.

Right…There is NO such thing as IRC. No really, it does not exist. This move by Microsoft must have saved thousands of children all around the world. And in the public reaction that follows:

Chris Atkinson, Internet safety expert at the NSPCC, told the UK’s Press Association: “This announcement is a very positive step forward and will help close a major supply line for sex abusers who go to great lengths to gain access to innocent children by grooming them on the Internet.

“For too long we have been told by the Internet industry that chatrooms are global and that nothing could be done to stop their escalation and their use by adults who target children.”

But he warned some children may go to other chatrooms.

“I think some children will stop going into chatrooms because of this decision. But some children will go to other chatrooms,” he added.

Question: where do CNN get their “experts” from? Does it take a genius to figure out that people will move to other chatrooms?

And in other news: Yahoo launches new product search engine.

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) — Internet media company Yahoo Inc. , broadening its efforts in the red-hot search services market, Tuesday rolled out a new search platform that lets users find products, compare prices and buy from different merchants.

Right…Google had that for at least a few months already, it’s called Froogle, and from what I have seen, it is actually quite useful. (Froogle, I haven’t try yahoo’s yet) HOWEVER, being search-engine powered, the information provided might NOT be correct. I believe that the prices listed in the results of Froogle are actually taken from the sites by bot, so if an item has multiple pricing or extra charges, then it will not show in the results. It all depends on how thorough the spider is when it crawls the pages.