Microsoft puts police link on Messenger

guardian.co.uk ^ | 8/24/06 | Mark Sweney

[GeorgiaDawg32]

Users of Microsoft's Messenger email service will be able to report suspected sexual predators directly to the police at the click of a mouse.

In an attempt to protect the 11 million users of the service from potential abusers, the software giant has struck up a partnership with the UK government-backed Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre.

[GeorgiaDawg32]

Good idea in theory..but how long until the service is abused by some teens who decide to pull pranks by reporting their friends (for some unknown transgression), or an ex-wife pushes the button on her ex-husband just to be mean..

once arrested, even if innocent, doesn't remove the cloud from over the head of the charged..(see the duke lacrosse players)..

[cripplecreek]

Yup, too much potential for abuse.

[MrEdd]

Good idea in theory..but how long until the service is abused by some teens who decide to pull pranks by reporting their friends (for some unknown transgression), or an ex-wife pushes the button on her ex-husband just to be mean..

Prank calls or letters or whatever to the police have always been there. And marked with their IP address this will very much be a self correcting problem. There really isn't any Internet anonymity on a direct police link.

[The_Reader_David]

I guess it depends what it does. If it's carefully tailored to on-line predators, it might automatically send a screenshot of the offending chat-room or message board exchange, along with some log data, in which case the provider's archives should be able to dispell casual attempt to frame innocents.

(If the 'framer' want to go to the trouble of spoofing IP addresses to fake postings, or hacking the chat-room's archives to leave a false trail, the lack of a convenient mechanism to report predation won't stop the frame-up.)

[TommyDale]

Remove the irritating Windows Messenger with this safe script:

http://www.dougknox.com/xp/scripts/xp_messenger_remove.vbs

[thoughtomator]

It is terribly naive to make it so easy for Internet users to use police to harass each other. I give this four weeks max before police department complaints cause them to pull the plug.

[TommyDale]

"I give this four weeks max before police department complaints cause them to pull the plug."

I give it 72 hours before the police department get tired of the annoying popups.

[El Gran Salseron]

"Remove the irritating Windows Messenger with this safe script:"

Sorry, but that is an entirely different program. Windows Messenger is a program in XP that is used by administrators over large networks to send/receive messages on the network. That problem has been all but eliminated. It used to be enabled by default. When it became exploited by pop-up jerks MS now disables it by default.

The "messenger" service being discussed in this article is for "Windows Live Messenger Service" which is the old MSN Messenger.

[TommyDale]

All I know is when I loaded XP Professional on a system, the Windows Messenger icons, popup reminder to sign up, etc from Microsoft still appear on the screen and need to be removed for sanity. I don't really care what the police and Microsoft do.