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The Internet Censorship

MySpace Users Revolt Against Murdoch 393

Posted by Hemos from the the-joy-of-running-user-communities dept.
arclightfire writes "Looks like Murdoch's News International have stired up a revolt within users of the MySpace file-sharing site they purchased for $629m (£355m) last July, reports the Independent; "Angry members of MySpace, the personal file-sharing website for young adults, are accusing Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation of censoring their postings and blocking their access to rival sites. The 38 million subscribers to MySpace...discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens. The intervention by News Corp in the traditionally open-access world of the web - in particular the alteration of personal user profiles - provoked a storm of angry posts...The protests gathered pace, and when 600 MySpace customers complained and a campaign began to boycott the site and relocate to rival sites such as Friendster, Linkedin, revver.com and Facebook.com, News Corp relented and restored the links.""
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MySpace Users Revolt Against Murdoch More

MySpace Users Revolt Against Murdoch

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  • Er... (Score:5, Informative)

    by tolan-b ( 230077 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:03AM (#14426517)
    MySpace isn't a file-sharing website is it?

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:22AM (#14426641)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Er... (Score:4, Funny)

        by British ( 51765 ) <british1500@gmail.com> on Monday January 09, 2006 @09:46AM (#14427204) Homepage Journal
        (has anyone noticed Slashdot going suckingly slow to reply to a thread? I should not have to hit Reload)

        Yep, and let's not a forget it's a site where boys cant keep their shirts on and the girls can't keep their pants on, at least to the pictures. Myspace is not even close to being a file sharing site. It's a site to prove to the world you have no idea how to make a web page. Hey, let's embed a jay-z video and an eminem video on the same page!

        Utterly stupid. You could use certain people's profiles as stress tests for firefox.

        • I was lurking around on there for a little while. It's fascinating what's up there and what they're trying to do, but in all sincerity, it appears to be an enormous astroturfing project. They seem to be mimicking the layout of Craigslist in many places too.

          I'm doubtful that most of the profiles are real. First off, there are more women on the system than men. Secondly, I would expect to see more bad photography and the odd person who writes in complete sentences. Finally, the profiles appear a little

          • I was lurking around on there for a little while...

            Better watch it, that sort of thing gets "out of hand" (in more ways than one!), next thing you know, the cops want to talk to you.

          • Re:Er... (Score:3, Insightful)

            by blincoln ( 592401 )
            First off, there are more women on the system than men.

            I've never been to MySpace, but I know a LOT of girls with Livejournals, versus a handful of guys. I think it's the social aspect.

            And yes, if you look at teenagers' livejournals as an aggregate, most of them are pretty similar, because the amount of unique experiences in a teenager's life is generally far outweighed by the normal ones.

    • Re:Er... (Score:2, Informative)

      by batteryman ( 245402 )
      It was used at one time for filesharing. It was more like Live365, but you could capture the streams to a file. You could also create your own streams from other peoples collections of music.

    • Re:Er... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:33AM (#14426708)
      It's not a file-sharing site, per se. However, it does have a large community of bands and musicians, and allows them to stream their music via builtin players and whatnot. I can (almost) see how a clueless journalist could confuse that with "file-sharing".

    • Re:Er... (Score:2, Funny)

      by DrStrange66 ( 654036 )
      MySpace isn't a file-sharing website is it?
      I thought myspace was a dating site. THAT must be the reason I haven't gotten a date from there yet!

    • Re:Er... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by ehrichweiss ( 706417 )
      Nope, it's not a file sharing site. Whoever had the reasoning that since it had links it could be used for file sharing needs to realize that only put every website on the planet on the **AA's hitlist with such a sweeping generalization. Having A building block of file sharing doesn't remotely equate to file sharing. BTW, they do a good job of keeping the 12 year olds off of MySpace, wish they could do that here nearly as well.
    • I'm not sure where that idea came from...I suppose MySpace could be used to share files but that doesn't seem to be what the majority uses it for. I have an account and have never come across any profiles that seemed to be geared toward rampant file sharing.

      Also, I've been able to use YouTube without any problems after having signed on to MySpace. Then again, I use Firefox so that may have something to do with things actually working correctly :)

  • It IS My Space (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:03AM (#14426520)
    It IS My Space.

    All Mine.

    Rupert

  • Net free? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by baldass_newbie ( 136609 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:03AM (#14426523) Homepage Journal
    Who ever suggested the net was free of censorship?
    Seriously.

    • Re:Net free? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by kentrel ( 526003 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:19AM (#14426620) Journal
      I wouldn't say the internet was free of censorship, because nothing is, nothing can be. There is a lot of freedom here, but when people sign up to a company's website, especially if its free, they can never really expect much. They are shitty tactics though, and people should respond by taking their business (free or paying) elsewhere.

    • Re:Net free? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by vertinox ( 846076 )
      Who ever suggested the net was free of censorship?

      No one said that... The saying goes, "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

      Clearly this is one of those times.

      Of course, had there never been censorship on the net then there wouldn't be any of this routing.

  • just a minute (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 42Penguins ( 861511 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:05AM (#14426531)
    Why, again, do we care about the cesspool that is MySpace?

    Wouldn't the world actually be a BETTER place if all the users revolted, and the site shut down altogether?

    • Re:just a minute (Score:5, Funny)

      by blowdart ( 31458 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:30AM (#14426694) Homepage
      Wouldn't the world actually be a BETTER place if all the users revolted, and the site shut down altogether?

      What, and risk having their target audience spread out over the net? At least myspace is a single area that contains their poetry about failed fumblings in the back site of mom's car, their discussions of exactly which black t-shirt are they supposed to wear with what foundation and their row upon row of identical self portraits each proclaiming they look goth because it's unique and original.

      No, we should hail Murdoch as a brave netizen for keeping them all in one (mosh) pool.

      • Haha funny but... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by FauxReal ( 653820 )
        I use MySpace to keep in contact with my friends, it's a good way to let people know about an upcoming event. I've also been able to contact/been contacted by friends from my past, some I have not heard from in more than 10 years. I'm not sure where this "file-sharing" moniker came from though, I've never used it to send or recieve a file, nor have I seen it mentioned on the site. Regardless, I have used it for social/business networking purposes and have gotten jobs out of it.

        It's also a good forum for

    • Re:just a minute (Score:5, Funny)

      by ScaryFroMan ( 901163 ) <scaryfroman@hotma i l . com> on Monday January 09, 2006 @09:09AM (#14426941)
      Wouldn't the world actually be a BETTER place if all the users revolted, and the site shut down altogether?

      I think the users are revolting already...

    • Re:just a minute (Score:5, Funny)

      by kalbzayn ( 927509 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @09:10AM (#14426956)
      I use myspace to make sure my monitor can really print all the millions of colors it claims it can. All you have to do is view any page on myspace and it is guaranteed to use each and ever color possible
    • no, because then all the people within it would escape and we'd have to deal with them. This way they all stay there and we know how to avoid them.

    • Re:just a minute (Score:3, Insightful)

      by daviddennis ( 10926 )
      I think almost all the pretty, young girls on the Internet are on it. There would be no more pretty girls if you vaporized all myspace users :-(.

      True, it shows a remarkable lack of taste in most pretty young girls' minds, but there are always the rare exceptions.

      I admire myspace because it gives people what they really want, not what marketers say they want and not what software developers say they want. They want to be able to use any color in the world and they can. They want to put horrible music up o

    • Re:just a minute (Score:5, Insightful)

      by The Good Reverend ( 84440 ) <michael@mic h r i s .com> on Monday January 09, 2006 @04:31PM (#14430889) Journal
      Why is this insightful?

      Myspace is a social networking site, and is introducing millions of kids to the ability to create their own web sites, code/design, and get online in general. There's a ton of crap there, just like there's a ton of crap on fark, and slashdot, and the internet as a whole. But the elitist "wow, we hate it because it seems shallow to us" attitude is unproductive and mean spirited.

  • Communities (Score:5, Insightful)

    by suso ( 153703 ) * on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:05AM (#14426535) Journal
    What the Web won't be like in 10 years? (1997) [amazon.com]

    So much for corporations being less in control at the hands of the communities.

    • Re:Communities (Score:2, Insightful)

      by heavy snowfall ( 847023 )
      If they care so much about freedom of speech they should buy themselves a domain and hosting (separately). That way they can change DNS info if their host opresses them :), and the registrars have shown they don't care what you do with the domains anyway.

    • Re:Communities (Score:2, Interesting)

      by lbrandy ( 923907 )
      So much for corporations being less in control at the hands of the communities.

      Maybe I'm crazy but... isn't that exactly what happened? A company had to give up control at the hands of the community?

  • File Sharing? (Score:5, Funny)

    by AsnFkr ( 545033 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:05AM (#14426539) Homepage Journal
    MySpace, the personal file-sharing

    Myspace is not a file-sharing site. Its one of those "Social-hub" places fat girls post blurry pictures of themselves on.
    • No kidding. Check out these losers. [myspace.com]

      • Re:File Sharing? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Catbeller ( 118204 )
        Ah, bitter old people.

        Who's the bigger losers: the people who post on MySpace, or the people who take the time to troll around MySpace for pictures of people to ridicule?
    • True that is one of the purposes...ok it's basically the major use of the site, but another feature that it holds is to put up music files of the bands that are listed there. Basically most of the time bands will put a couple of free songs up there to generate interest in them and hopefully actually sell some of their music.

      As stupid as I think the censorship of the internet is, it IS the site of the corporation. They can limit what you do on the site.

      Oh well, more reason for me to steer clear of the
      • As stupid as I think the censorship of the internet is, it IS the site of the corporation. They can limit what you do on the site.

        What you say it true and I have been modded down to -1 for pointing this out in the past. At the same time trying not to be evil is also a great way of winning people over. When a company takes an anti-social tactic on a social site, then people will get unnerved and feel upset about it. Censorship is a great way of scaring people off, especially if you did not indicate clearly

  • Rupert is just jealous. (Score:4, Funny)

    by ryg0r ( 699756 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:07AM (#14426550)
    No one has added him as to their friends list. Of course he's going to get a bit cranky.

    However samy is my hero. [namb.la]

  • Just a quick note (Score:2, Informative)

    by Kanpai ( 713697 )
    Rupert Murdoch's company is actually called News Corperation, not News International.

  • Way to go, MySpace users! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by standbypowerguy ( 698339 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:08AM (#14426558) Homepage
    This is a perfect example of how to fight commercial censorship... vote with your wallet.

  • "Freedom of Speech" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RobotRunAmok ( 595286 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:08AM (#14426563)
    ...belongs to those who own the presses, a fact-of-life with which I suspect Mr. Murdoch is well-acquainted.

    "My Space." That's funny.

  • Nobody in the UK reads the Independent, but now everyone on /. does?

    Weird.

  • News International? (Score:4, Informative)

    by nwbvt ( 768631 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:15AM (#14426598)
    The British newspaper? How does it control MySpace? Surely you mean News Corp, the name of the parent company.

    • Re:News International? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Shimbo ( 100005 )
      The British newspaper? How does it control MySpace? Surely you mean News Corp, the name of the parent company.

      News International is the name of the main UK subsidiary of News Corp. Easy mistake for a Brit to make - I'd never heard of News Corp either.
  • A prime example of the power of traffic this site was created out of string and bubble gum and its worth 600 Million dollars.... Where's all this consumer data getting sold to?

    You think News Corp. is making that $$ back on adds alone?

    Any one care to let me in on the secret??
    Who buys the data? What name is it resold under?

  • Hm... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cmarguel ( 795687 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:21AM (#14426633)
    This is more common than one might think. I'm not surprised that nobody noticed the same thing going on with Yahoo Messenger. It took me months for my friends and I to notice that Imageshack and Friendster links, among others, were being censored whenever we would try to send links to each other. It makes me wonder who else has been doing it behind our backs. Hopefully, the companies that have gone unnoticed will stop doing this, now that they can see what could happen.

    • Hopefully, the companies that have gone unnoticed will stop doing this, now that they can see what could happen.

      What exactly "could happen"? A bunch of bloggers whined at a big corporation, who inexplicably listened to them. I'm 100% sure this is the exception and not the norm. News corp has bigger fish to fry than some fat chick with a fascination with INXS.

      Don't make the mistaken assumption that this is any kind of precedent, as I'm also 100% sure all the big players (Yahoo!, Google (blogsp

    • I hope they keep doing it.

      I've been saying garbage since 1995-1996, maybe people will actually start to believe it. I put yahoo users in exactly the same category as AOL users.

  • If the dot com bubble taught us anything, it's that "If it's free on the internet, it's unreliable and fully controlled by somebody who will run it into the ground". I'm costantly telling that to bands who rely on Myspace as their primary website. Very soon, Fox might, and could pull an MP3.com and just pull the plug, leaving thousands (millions?) of bands without a web presence. There also plenty of people who only communicate through myspace, and so when myspace goes, all communication ends, and they lose those friends. These kids who think they have the right to post whatever they want are sadly misinformed, but they are 12 years old (claiming to be 18 of course), so we can't blaim them for their naivety.
    • Free is fine, as long as you never lock yourself in to the service.

      Google and Yahoo's search are fine, because other than a bit of familiarity with their interfaces, they have no lock-in on me. They can't hurt me much other than sticking ads around (and eventually, if the search pages gets unusable, I have to switch.) But every time you use a "free" service provided by a company, you gotta ask yourself ("how exactly could this company hurt me?") Ultimately, they're a business out to make money, and unless
    • If the dot com bubble taught us anything, it's that "If it's free on the internet, it's unreliable and fully controlled by somebody who will run it into the ground".

      I would hope not. Otherwise the GIMP [gimp.org], that universe-in-a-box Celestia [shatters.net] (which I do admit was held back a bit when main man Chris Laurel took a long break; it has a lot less bugs on Windows now that he's back) and newly-ad-and-cost-free Opera [opera.com] wouldn't be on my PC anymore.

      All quite reliable to me (on Windows, mind you, so something was done
    • True, being locked in sucks. I fell to this once. My parents had AOL back 10 years ago or so. I had a screen name for so long that everyone knew who I was. I have long since moved out and continued to use my screen name for years via AIM.....well, the parents were finally smart enough to loose aol...but with that, i lost my SN and could not get it back for the life of me. Anyways, to make a long story short...they switched back to aol and I still can't get my sn back...But i'm still locked into AIM with a d

  • Shut it down (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sulphurlad ( 772436 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:27AM (#14426680)
    My Youngest son was buying his drugs ( mostly pot, at least I fucking hope ) from this site. And after hacking into his profile, tracking his so-called friends and online buddies, my wife and I deetermined that the site was mostly being used by him for getting with his drug buddies. Hell there was a kid on his buddy list and had a picture of like a poiund of pot on his bed with him in it, and it didn't look like Photoshop either. Were it not for my Oldest who uses it for what it was supposed to be, chatting and sharing vid's of his motorcyle movies and stunts, than I would just blacklist the damn thing.

    As it is now, my wife spends alot of time educating parents and showing them what their kids are really up too.
    Some are shocked, some don't seem to care.

    But I guess the REAL PROBLEM is not the website, it's the lack of parents being involved in their kids lives.

    DAMN, I hate it when I'm my own Devil's Advocate........

    • Re:Shut it down (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MrPerfekt ( 414248 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:55AM (#14426835) Homepage Journal
      Some people choose to buy drugs, some people choose to meet people, some people choose to listen to music, some people choose to....

      A social network imitating society.. what are the odds?

    • Just be careful (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mindaktiviti ( 630001 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @09:15AM (#14426988)
      Trust issues aside, maybe it's time to teach your son about encryption and the stupidity of using a public forum for buying illegal drugs.

      I'm being serious here.

      Regardless of your disapproval for such a thing, regardless of whether or not he will stop because of your wishes, he has to learn to be a little more discreet, a criminal record is something you wouldn't want your son to experience as it can hamper him in his future job opportunities and across the border travel.

      If you can hack into his account and see exactly what goes on with his other buddies, don't think that it's difficult for that same kid to get arrested for having a picture of a pound of weed, have his computer confiscated, and then have the police go through his conversations with his other friends who'll he will easily rat out for a slap on the wrist.

    • Re:Shut it down (Score:4, Insightful)

      by xoip ( 920266 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @09:20AM (#14427031) Homepage
      While you're shutting down MySpace make sure you get every other means of communications those Pot Smokers use too...Cell Phones, msn...aol...yahoo...gaim...jabber...personal contact at school...ban them from the shopping mall...play ground...hell you could escort the kid everywhere he goes but I doubt this war on drugs mentality would make anyones life better.
    • The same thing could be said about schools, parties, anywhere where there are people. And what their kids are really doing seems a bit exaggerated from my point of view, but I'm not in the US, maybe things are different over there.

      In Australia (from memory) the statistics are somewhere along the lines of 30% of people use some sort of [illegal] drug, and

      If you think that there's any way that you can stop teenagers from taking drugs you're kidding yourself though, people take drugs, people drink, and nothi
    • As it is now, my wife spends alot of time educating parents and showing them what their kids are really up too. Some are shocked, some don't seem to care.

      Because maybe they never really wanted kids and don't really care about the suffering they brought by bringing a sentient being into the world.

      But seriously, its ignorant to try to control the source of information.

      Just like the war on drugs, you could bomb columbia into the stone age and execute all the drug lords, but if people demand the drugs someone w
    • My Youngest son was buying his drugs ( mostly pot, at least I fucking hope ) from this site. And after hacking into his profile, tracking his so-called friends and online buddies, my wife and I deetermined that the site was mostly being used by him for getting with his drug buddies.

      So... who was that friend again?

      hehehe just kidding ;)
    • I wonder if he has a "profile" at any of the cannabis / marijuana websites like http://overgrow.com/ [overgrow.com] marijuana.com, http://cannabis.com/ [cannabis.com] (shortcut url: http://cann.com/ [cann.com] ) too?

      Anyways, you may want to direct him to Drug Abuse Help http://www.drugabuse.com/ [drugabuse.com] ... in particular the message board there - honest, non-biased discussion.

      Ron

    • Re:Shut it down (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Woy ( 606550 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @11:34AM (#14428049)
      Your Youngest son's biggest problem is a dad who considers "motorcycle stunts" safer than smoking pot.

      Oh, and hacking your son's private stuff is also a great lesson on trust. My father pulled that stunt too and it cost him bitter tears of regret a few years after the fact. I hope your son educates himself on the practical uses of cryptography and cuts you off from his digital life as he probably already did from his "real" life.

    • Motorcycle Stunts? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Hershmire ( 41460 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @11:44AM (#14428165) Homepage
      You'll let one child perform motorcycle stunts and show off to his friends but you won't let your other child buy pot? Am I missing something here? I'd rather my kid smoke a joint than eat through a tube for the rest of his life. Not that I'd like my kids to do drugs, but you get my point.

    • Re:Shut it down (Score:3, Informative)

      by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 )
      First, I have to say there are serious trust issues if you have to hack your son's account. If he EVER finds out (and I hope he does) that you did so, not only will he lose all trust in you, but he will just be more careful about people finding out the next time he buys drugs.

      Which leads me to my next point. You demonize MySpace, which is simply a communication tool. If he doesn't get his hookup on MySpace, he'll get it through AIM, Friendster, cellphone, etc. So you are correct, it is not the website th

  • Stop being so cheap (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Mr.Dippy ( 613292 )
    I haven't found one decent looking webpage on MySpace. It seems to be home for teenagers and college students who are too cheap to pay 3 to 10 dollars a month for a hosting company and who still think the blink tag is way cool. If you want freedom of speech and all that other non-sense on the web go get yourself a domain name, pay the few bucks a month for hosting, and a 20 dollar book on HTML. You get what you pay for.
    • Hey man, are you saying there is no place on the web for broke teens with no skill? My kids aren't paying for a domain out of thier allowance just to say hey. Let MySpace and Friendster and $$$$$$ster take care of a place for these kids to "shout out" to each other. It is free to them and it allows communication in a much more time independent manner than IM. Plus it is another place to store and share their pictures. Why did they get those digital cameras for Christmas?

      My hat's off to the MySpace users

    • Re:Stop being so cheap (Score:4, Insightful)

      by thrills33ker ( 740062 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @10:15AM (#14427373) Homepage
      As a 29-year-old MySpace user and owner of my own domain (in fact I have my own vmware server), may I be the first to invite you to shut the hell up?

      You want to set up your own site on your own domain/hosting, go right ahead. Good luck getting any visitors. You want to make contact with new people, communicate with them, set up a virtual social network of people who you can later meet up with in real life, well you need something like MySpace. It's the users, stupid. Oh, and you get to discover cool new bands as well.

      And another thing - is the irony of a lot of Slashdot users making fun of a lot of "12-year-old goth" MySpace users lost on everyone but me? I frequent both sites, and let me tell you, MySpace has a LOT more "normal" people on it than Slashdot.

      So in summary, shut up.

  • Interesting (Score:2, Interesting)

    by artitumis ( 934987 )

    I find it wildly amusing that MySpace will lock down hotlinking images and videos to rival's sites, but they have failed to address their users who hotlinked away 1.5 gigs [artitumis.com] of my personal bandwidth over the course of a week in December.

    Before I got slammed for not taking steps myself to prevent hotlinking, I did use the tools provided by my host via cPanel to disable hotlinking. The only problem is it did not work. I had to contact Tech Support and have them apply the correct code to the .htaccess. After c

    • Actually, I quite enjoy people that hotlink images from my site... I regularly watch my logs to see where it's happening, then substitute the hot-linked images with something like the goatse.cx main image.

      Normally, that takes care of the problem quickly, and teaches the person a lesson in the process. Surprisingly though, some people never notice - which is especially funny when it's being used as someone's avitar.

      MadCow.
      • Actually, I quite enjoy people that hotlink images from my site... I regularly watch my logs to see where it's happening, then substitute the hot-linked images with something like the goatse.cx main image.

        I hotlinked to SomethingAwful once. Never again.

        They seem to detect hotlinking by checking the referrer ID, and automatically substituting a different image if the link hasn't come from SA itself. And do they ever have some horrific images to substitute.

  • Way to go (Score:3, Funny)

    by l33tlamer ( 916010 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @08:59AM (#14426868)
    Anime nerd, Manga geeks, Hentai freaks, Loli Maniacs, Warez Distributors and Attention-grabbing Cam whores... I mean MySpace users rejoice :)

  • My God, that's terrible (Score:5, Funny)

    by Deep Fried Geekboy ( 807607 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @09:05AM (#14426923)
    If only there were OTHER ways of posting pictures of yourself on the internet with the spots photoshopped out in the hope that some girl in Kansas will think you're hot and add her to her friends list while discussing with your bedroom-bound peer group the latest netvid of some jerk wiping out on his BMX and straddling his nuts on the crossbar while simultaneously downloading pirated copies of godawful corporate-fabricated whine rock.

    Oh, the humanity! Won't somebody think of the children?

    Oh, hang on...
  • Bill Gates was bad... Murdoch eats people and companies for lunch. As soon as I heard about this, I knew MySpace was doomed. Not that I use it or care about it. I imagine the denizens of MySpace will revolt, usage stats will plummet, someone will start an alternate site with no restrictions, and next thing you know Murdoch will be flogging his "yes-men" for making him buy the fsck-ing company.
  • After the company has shown their disrepect for users, why did the users go back at all?

    I wish people would hold companies' feet to fire more often. If the only "punishment" a company suffers after getting caught pulling shitty behavior is a few days of bad PR and having to revert the shittiness, then what's the incentive to not be shitty?

    How many shitty things will they try next? How many shitty things have they done that don't rile the attention of users?

    You know their shitty. I know their shitty. *They* know thier shitty, and don't care, as long as users keep coming back after a perfunctory, insincere sincere apology -- Until the next time they get caught doing something shitty.

    Why do users let the cycle continue?

    This is not just Newscorp I'm talking about. Consider Microsoft (Verizon phones), Sony (DRM Rootkit), etc. Yet people are lining up for the XBox and can't wait for the PS3.

    I'm not much of a gamer, but I've got a PS2. The next gaming system I buy will be a Revolution. Why? Because I haven't heard of Nintendo being shitty to users. (I'm likely wrong, but then I'll have to find which one has the least amount of shittiness. But considering Sony and MS, Nintendo will have to be *really* shitty for me to not go with them.)

    Same with RIAA. Why do people buy their stuff? I'll admit I'm a bit of a hypocrit here, because I broke down and bought my wife an RIAA-disc for christmas. (I got her severals CDs, only one of which has RIAA pawmarks on it.)

    I'd like to own American Idiot, because its good music, but can't bring myself to giving any RIAA organization my money. (I made an exception for my wife's happiness.)

    The only RIAA music I buy now is *used* CDs. With only three or four exceptions in the probably the past five years, I haven't been the original buyer of any RIAA-tainted CDs.

    RIAA is shitty. Therefore, I don't give RIAA money. (Well, mostly. I try very hard.)

    Microsoft is shitty. Therefore, I don't give Microsoft money. (Yay, Ubuntu! Yay, FSF!)

    Disney is shitty. (Senator Disney? Copyright extensions?) Unfortunately, Disney has grudgingly gotten a few of my dollars because of the Disney Princess merchandise and videos -- the crack cocaine of 5-year-old daughters. What's a good alternative to this? Barbie. Is Mattel shitty? I don't know. Anything else?

    The thing is, it takes a little work to be a fully informed consumer. Many corporations count on our ignorance. However, the internet improved user-to-user communication so much that it's hard for companies to hide their shittiness for long.

    Now, if I could only stop my money from supporting the Bush administration without going to jail....

    • Back in the 8-bit days, Nintendo was *nasty* to third-party developers. Basically, if you made Famicom (NES) games, you could not make Sega Mark III (Master System) games. I think Namco was the first company to publically rebel against them - and that hurt them a lot. Also, third-parties were allowed to release a very small number of games per year; to work around such limitations, they created divisions, like Ultra Games (Konami) and LJN (Acclaim).

      But it's been so long, they're nice now, and everybody forg
    • Most people just don't care that much. When a corporation does something to them, they'll whine, but they won't care enough to actually inconvenience themselves switching to a competitor.

      I mean, look at the number of people on Slashdot who still run Windows while claiming to hate Microsoft. "Oh, I need all those games", "OpenOffice isn't quite compatible enough", "I don't want to have to learn something new". Bleagh.

      I remember first becoming aware of this in the UK after telecom deregulation. I'd be talking

  • Nothing's Free... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JTorres176 ( 842422 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @09:50AM (#14427233) Homepage
    I hate to point this out... actually, I don't really mind pointing it out, but Myspace is nothing but a free "make your own crappy website where your friends make their crappy website" hosting places. All they do is make a haven for teenagers and child molesters to make as many "friends" as possible on their web pages for no charge. By providing an over-simplified interface to make as many nasty websites as possible so the friends of their users will look and generate more advertising money.

    Out of the free use, I'd say these people can pretty much enforce whatever they want on their space. If they don't want any racist sites, they can filter out as many sites by Aryans and Black Panthers as they want to maintain this. Extend this as far as they can into things like revenue generators. They get a check from Coke, so the word Pepsi isn't allowed in virtual ads on the individual pages. They get paid by file sharing company A, they're not going to allow file sharing company B into their pages.

    Nothing's free, these people offer a server and maintain complete control over content.

    Now if only I could get my daughter off the damn thing, I'd be happy.
    • You can choose to see MySpace.com as anything you like, but what made it valuable was the loyalty and the frequency of the eyes on that site. It was prime and largely uncultivated marketting soil. In my view, the activity described in the article would be like bar owners attempting to stiffle discussion about bar-hopping and to prrevent their patrons from leaving to visit another club. After all, the patrons aren't a lot different even if the demographic is shifted slightly to the younger end of that spe
  • But where else am I going to
    foist the fact that I spent
    most of my vital early years practicing scales and
    writing music with no
    commercial potential to
    the point of losing all
    my social skills instead
    of hanging out with my peers?

    (see: http://www.myspace.com/aliensporebomb [myspace.com] for corroboration).

    We now return you to your regularly scheduled slashdot
    experience and apologize for
    any inconvenience.
  • This is a proof of the free market concept of needing no regulations.

    Customers of Company A (MySpace) don't get what they want. Company B (and C and D and E, etc) offer a better product. Customers complain, customers change hands. Company A either listens to the mass choice making going on, or they go out of business.

    Isn't freedom awesome? Hundreds of thousands of people who don't even know each other are able to make a decision together without actually having to decide on what they want. The desires of the masses is met by open competition, not forced by regulations.

    Up until 15 years ago, I could understand the regulations debate. Now that the Internet allows millions (billions) to review companies on a whim (and soon via WAP and SMS), the need to regulate would be better covered by more competition. Regulations raise the cost of entry to a market, decreasing competition, decreasing choice, and increasing prices.

  • New Headline (Score:3, Funny)

    by MrCopilot ( 871878 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @11:37AM (#14428091) Homepage Journal
    MySpace Users Revolting.

  • I'm probably wrong, but (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Hosiah ( 849792 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @11:47AM (#14428190)
    I hope people are finally Getting It that if we are to subjugate ourselves entirely to technology, if we are content to surround ourselves with gadgets and gizmos, that than perhaps it's not a good idea to leave every single last scrap of control over technology, from space stations to digital watches, in the hands of about five trillionaires worldwide. Can anybody see a problem there?

  • FYI Murdock owns FOX News (Score:3, Informative)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @03:26PM (#14430262) Journal
    For those who live in the states you know what kind of biased garbage they produce. Murdock is an ultraconservative and Foxnews is owned by one of bush's cousins.

    I personally credit Murdock and Fox news for putting Bush into office twice due to the brainwashing. Whats scary is more viewers watch Fox then CNN and MSNBC combined and I could not believe the misinformation that is spewed out. Fox heavily went after Clinton as the most corrupt leader in American history but called Delay's indicement criminalizing politics.

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