Credit : Slashdot
Update : I ama retard. Link to the article about Yahoo is here and also
fixed in the article's main body.
Way back in Jun 04 I wrote a bit about AOL's sketchy
practice of marketing their Kid's Only Rooms as "a safe environment on the
Net" all the while knowing that it was like putting up a giant sign saying "All
the little kiddies are right here!" for the net pedophiles. AOL still reaps huge
profit from unsavvy parents this way but finally someone else
has shed a bit of light on this practice by another Net business
concern : Yahoo.
See the deal was that on Yahoo! Chat you could make
a room with any sort of name you wanted under any of their heading like
"education" or "School". Pedophiles moved in ffast and they quickly became a
swap meet for porn and a place to "groom" kids for potential meets.
Yahoo of course had no interest in shutting this
down because Yahoo Chat is a massive ad revenue generator. The more people using
more of it's rooms the more money it made. This practice was recently exposed
causing yahoo to disallow the practice of creating your own rooms anywhere is
Yahoo Chat. Maybe someone at a major new station will wake up and take a look at
AOL too?
The bottom line is that we as a society insist on ID
only to verify that you are over a certain age and
have no mechanism for verifying that a Net user is
under a certain age. This ensures that sites which
cater to children are merely concentrators for adults posing as children for
sexual purposes. Without a "Minor ID" card or something similar there are no
safe places for kids on the net. Anywhere.
