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ICQ Banishes Children Under 13 254

Posted by emmett from the uh-oh dept.
BubbaFett writes: "I received a GnomeICU message this morning from UIN #1 stating: 'To address a U.S. law aimed at protecting children's privacy, we cannot permit children under age 13 to use the ICQ service. Your profile presently shows your age as under 13. Therefore, we will close your account within 48 hours. If you are under 13, you may open an account only after your 13th birthday. We regret any inconvenience.' ICQ's privacy policy stating the same thing is here. I guess I should go change my age in the profile."

Update: 07/01 17:33 PM by michael : Several readers are confusing COPA, the Child Online Protection Act, which was an internet censorship law passed after the Communications Decency Act was struck down, and has itself been ruled unconstitutional, with the similarly-acronymed COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which regulates what websites can do to invade the privacy of children under 13, and which has not been struck down nor even challenged.
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ICQ Banishes Children Under 13 More

ICQ Banishes Children Under 13

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  • I recieved a system message when I first signed up.
  • Funny....You don't even have to have a job to get a credit card in Canada. All you have to do is go to school (University or College).

    Plus, age doesn't matter. If you aren't in school get someone to co-sign. If you are in school, they don't care if you are 16.

    FunkyDemon

  • Some impact (Score:3)

    by zeck ( 103790 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @12:16PM (#963525)
    While this of course will not stop 12 year olds from using ICQ, it will prevent profiles from saying that users are 12 years old. This will in a way increase the privacy of children under 13, as it will prevent them involuntarily giving their age out online.
  • And you don't even have a slashdot account ! Wow.
  • American companies, due to COPPA, are not allowed to gather information from children under 13. Not just Americans under thirteen... anyone under 13.

    I ask myself why the US government feels itself inclined to protect the privacy of children all over the world. All I've seen from COPPA so far though are infringements on my privacy, as various sites across the web have demanded me to disclose my age and country of residence. The means erected to protect the privacy of American children under 13 is actually infringing on same privacy of American people over 13 and of all non-Americans. The cure seems to be much worse than the disease here, as I see more and more often with new laws in the US... IMHO, YMMV, IANAL, [insert standard disclaimer] :)


    )O(
    the Gods have a sense of humour,
  • Lets be honest here, it appears that you are the one living in a dreamworld.

    15 year olds are not limited to spending around $20. I am 15 and in the last 6 months probably spent 20 times that amount over the internet. Whats more, this is money I have earnt, not from my parents (who for the record are not anything close to rich). I know lots of people with jobs and with no monetary obligations it is all largely disposable income.

    I wouldn't listen to anyone under 16..
    And why not? A large majority of under 16s are vastly more technologically aware than a large percentage of the population. I'm sure you'd love to know I advise several companies on their IT systems and...ISPs. You can't put a cut off age limit on knowledge, especially with something like the internet and computers.
  • LICQ still does display their hidden IP (in a set of brackets). and I'm pretty sure there are piles of ICQ (win32) hacks that let you see other ppl's hidden IPs. And this is all without them even sending you a message...

    ~~~

  • Please note that the ICQ service is not for use by children under 13 years of age. If it comes to ICQ's attention through reliable means that a registered user is a child under 13 years of age, ICQ will cancel that user's account.

    I find it hard to believe that ICQ can possible consider the information filled in the user-info to be reliable!

    What about children under the age of 13 that are located outside the united states, surely they should still be able to use ICQ. Also the age box doesn't cater for people over the age of 100, which is ageist as well.

    Well next time ^~cutebaby~^ (age 18) messages me I'll have no idea whether she's a deceptive 6 year old or not :(( - i'll sue if they send me to prison


  • Per their terms of service, Yahoo! doesn't allow users under 18 to post personal ads. However, a lot of the non-porn ads state that the woman's age is 18 in the header, and then the first sentence of the body is "hi im actually 16/f but they wouldn't let me put 16."


    Yeah, but if you contact one of those "16 year olds" she'll look/sound like a 25-45 and want your credit card number before talking to or visiting you.


    If "she" dosn't want money i'd assume she's a federal agent. :)


  • Basicaly what the US goverment is slowly doing is attempting to bypass the laws of darwanism.

    Good morning, Troll... well, much of the spelling does reek of temporal starvation... Darwin's laws are fine for genetic programming, but nobody authoritative seriously expects them to work in reality. That's why we have neo-Darwinists, neo-catastrophists, and so forth.

    Darwin's own criteria for falsification of his theory were met decades ago, and the evidence dismissing his theory just keep piling up. For examples, there are (TIME cover stories notwithstanding) fewer and fewer "transitional" cadidates among the billions of fossils so far unearthed; more and more polystrate fossils and out-of-sequence "index" fossils; vertebrate fish (and the lampreys that live on them) have now been found in Cambrian rock (in China), extending the range of vertebrates to practically the entire "geologic column".

    A new theory is required; one which requires you to bulletproof your children well before they might be exposed to Nasty Stuff.
  • what I'm looking forward to is a fully distributed system of communication where every client is also a sort of server

    Well, IRC is pretty close to that, except that it is a network of servers with a network of clients attached to them. Still pretty distributed though.

    The problem of fully distributing a chat network is how to deal with identities. How do you stop people from taking over other's identities, or sniffing all messages sent to a certain person? (hmm... public key encryption! answered my own question...)

    But then how do you deal with discovery of other people? With no centralized server, it could take a VERY long time from the point when someone logs on to when you can see they are part of the network. Gnutella has this problem now.

    - Isaac =)
  • Distributed Messaging Service?

    You mean like email :)
    --

    A mind is a terrible thing to taste.

  • Actually, it's basic human WRONG.
  • Try registering with an age that is less than 18 - You will get the following URL:
    http://edit.yahoo.com/config/register

    Dont be so cynical, not everyone on Slashdot is just trying to cause trouble!
  • not to mention that most of us who have credit cards would *never* give them out online....d'you really think people are stupid enough to give out cc's for *age verification* ???
  • there's no way for you to say "I don't want X knowing I'm on."
    someone could be on, but you wouldn't be guaranteed of knowing it

    I posted another message mentioning your second point, but your first point gave me an idea to solve it...

    When a person adds you to their Buddy List thing, it doesn't actually add you to *theirs*. Instead, your client adds them to your Notify List, whuch means that when you log on it sends out a message to all the people on your list. This also allows *you* to manage who knows you are on or not. Unless you have a static IP number, it would be difficult for others to track you.

    - Isaac =)
  • In a related article.... GTE, Pac Bell and other phone companies have now released a statement, "No Children under the age of 13 may use the Telephone." Every time you call you will now have to enter in your birthdate into the numeric pad.
  • Yes, but you are then asking for Parents to actualy raise there own kids, or for the childeren to use common sense in their pursuit of cybersex. Either way, you are asking alot, at least from the average American. Why else would we "need" such a law? (that's either of them)
    Also realize that the average person doesn't think about how much information that they give out in a random conversation, not their real name or address, but often enough to find one or the other. People are just to trusting on the internet because they Think they are untracable, safe from the outside world. We all know how true that is.
    What should be done then? Well, why on Mother Earth does ICQ list your IP number? How about some guidelines for newbies on what might not be good to put in your profile? How about actualy increasing the security of the network to help secure the privacy of the user?
    No, too much work. Law says we only have to protect the kids, so, we'll just deal with them.

  • When I was 11 or 12 (I think), I received a credit card application mailed to me from the bank of montreal (a bank in Canada), who later mailed me saying they screwed up and I was too young.

  • I've used ICQ for a couple of years now (not by choice but because it's the most convenient way to stay in touch with a lot of people I know.

    The interface was a million times better before AOL took over. It was very intuitive, but after AOL took it they mostly seemed to bulk add space for advertising, a few extra redundant features as well as half-incorporating the web, and they didn't seem to care about code maintenance at all. The result was a buggy, horrible interface.

    If you have to use ICQ, try to get either an older version of it (on the early side of 0.9x), or use an ICQ clone. There are lots of clones listed on freshmeat [freshmeat.org], but I'm not sure if many would compile for a Windows box. Alternatively you could try something like Odigo [odigo.com] which talks to ICQ and looks quite cool. Last time I tried it it still crashed a bit and the window wasn't very resizable, but otherwise it was great.

  • It's time for an international body to govern the internet, not just America.

    It'd better not be the UN. They're too close to the Articles of Confederation and the Confederate States of America, neither of which is around today.


    --
  • that was the first thing which cross my mind also....

  • They've made it illegal to lie to AOL about who you are?

    Yup, it's been illegal to lie about who you are for quite a long time. It's called "fraud".

    If AOL doesn't like it screw em. If the US legal system doesn't like it screw them too. They can't touch me anyway.

    AMERICA reached into NORWAY and threw Jon Johansen into jail. Please check your attitude at the door. (No, I don't think it was right, and I hate my country for doing it. But morality doesn't change history.)


    --
  • No problem, right? The firewall keeps the traffic out, the WebRamp times out and disconnects after the programmed time, right? HA! Each incoming packet, of any kind, to any address, is counted as activity on the line, even if the next step is for the firewall to drop it on the floor

    Then that is a brain-dead implementation. If you don't want the packet, it shouldn't have any effect in keeping your connection up. Should other people's technology be constrained by that? If Linux TCP/IP stacks were to cause some vendors router to consistently lock up should we ban Linux? Or should the vendor fix their stuff?

  • I think you are wrong. I dont know about the law-issues and stuff but if you install ICQ2Ka/b (win) (or whatever it is =)) You have to accept some conditions, one of them is that you have to be over 13 years of age.
  • Does the law even apply to non-commercial sites? I thought it only applied to commercial sites. Even if it purported to apply to non-commercial sites, could it? The enforcement is done by the FTC, i.e. Federal Trade Commission. do they have jurisdiction over non-commercial sites? If they do not, then does that preclude enforcement of the law over such sites?

    Any lawyers care to comment?

  • I have never had a version of ICQ which wasn't Beta (perhaps I did _ages_ ago). I don't think ICQ take "Beta" to actually mean Beta at all... for example, how easy is it to find some way of reporting a bug? I've looked through the ICQ menus and webpages to report a 'feature' and I still haven't found an address...
  • I see no way Mirabillis can enforce this without major changes in thier practices

    Major changes like deleting accounts listed as younger than 13? Not a difficult feat. Hell, 1 minute of coding, 1 minute of testing, 2 minutes of repair (if you're me, and screw up alot), and you're done. Major changes? I think not.
    -Jer
  • I think you missed the gag!

    Though your post illustrates just what a problem these things are.
  • Credit cards are such a bogus verification method though. I only just got my first credit card and I'm 29. I didn't need one before now. This means that had ICQ implemented this before last month I couldn't have used their "service".

    I'm also willing to bet there are a LOT of people out there OVER 18 who don't have credit cards. I know 2 people, and I don't KNOW that many people, ones in his early 40's, the other is in his 50's, neither have credit cards. One is down to the fact that until recently he was homeless, the other has always paid cash for stuff. This whole credit card verification thing is such a STUPID and incredibly inaccurate method of verifiying age.

    ---

  • so this should not affect me.

    That's wrong. If you under 13 and use ICQ anywhere in the world, this will affect you. ICQ is not allowed to collect information about children under 13 as long as ICQ is owned by a company based in the US. It doesn't matter where you are, if you use services provided by an American company, American laws can affect you.
  • I just reinstalled ICQ after a format, and on the little welcome to ICQ message it now says:IMPORTANT NOTICE

    Please note that the ICQ service is not for use by children under 13 years of age. If it comes to ICQ's attention through reliable means that a registered user is a child under 13 years of age, ICQ will cancel that user's account.

    Also please note that the ICQ software, as with most Internet applications, is vulnerable to various security issues and hence should be considered unsecured. By using the ICQ Software and the Internet in general, you may be subject to various risks, including among others:

    [Snip]

    European Union ICQ users understand and consent to the processing of personal information in the United States.

  • Not A Hoax. Here's Proof (Score:5)

    by Seumas ( 6865 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @12:22PM (#963555)
    Please note that the ICQ service is not for use by children under 13 years of age. If it comes to ICQ's attention through reliable means that a registered user is a child under 13 years of age, ICQ will cancel that user's account.

    http://www.icq.com/legal/usenote.html [icq.com]
    ---
    seumas.com

  • I've been thinking about this for a few weeks. And it really needs a lot more thinking :) But I'm pretty sure it's possible, and could be made fast enough. And I'm thinking it as of a replacement for IRC, with channels and all. Everything would be based on public key cryptography.

    I've set up a page for this in http://irssi.org/dchat/ [irssi.org], the current idea paper is a bit old however, the flood routing can't work with huge networks :) Dividing the network to smaller groups would be better.

  • Simply speaking, children under 13 cannot legally waive these rights.

    But a child of say, 13 through 17 can?

  • I really am beginning to dislike this under 13 stuff

    I roleplay alot so that hurt me big when 10 chars of mine were locked from Yahoo for having ages marked with ?? or under 13
    Really this is a sad time on the Internet.

    -Sarkdas (I got the blues..)
  • I'm also willing to bet there are a LOT of people out there OVER 18 who don't have credit cards.

    Not to mention that there are pleny of people under 18 who have credit cards, making it a totally useless form of age verification.
  • I'd be careful with using that card on-line. Visa check cards usually don't have the same "protections" as real Visa cards. My wife bought me a CDR for Christmas from UCD with a Visa check card and it came delivered damaged. The box was fine, they just shipped a damaged unit. It took us like 3 months to clear that up, because the check cards don't have the same features as real Visa cards as far as consumer protection. Your's might, but I'd check it out...
  • I wonder how much longer it will take for common usage to make it a word (kinda like ain't is in the dictionary now) and all you spelling nazi's have to find something new to obsess about.

    Vermifax
  • Hey, im under 18 myself and Im not complaining. Its been shown that until a certain age 'children' dont have the psychological maturity to fully understand the consequences of their actions. nuff said

  • Is economic status 'protected?'

    No.

    The protected classes are limited to those explicitly listed in the law by Congress. There may be state or local laws that cover more areas, such as sexual preference. In some areas, such as hiring or lending money, a practice can be prohibited if it has a "disparate impact" on a protected class.

  • Human history is largely a story of what those whose rights were acknowledged and protected did to those whose rights were denied. All peole have natural rights which they are born with. However our society pretends that only people over a certain age whose skin is a certain color and who only belong to certain religous sects and make over a certain ammount of money truly have rights. Others may enjoy priviliges which are much like what the chosen few have as rights, but these are priviliges. They can be stripped away whenever they become inconvenient or troublesome to those who have power. I believe that everyone who can read and write should have the right to vote, regardless of age. Now before you assume I'm some stupid kid you should know that I'm 28 years old and a college graduate. I think that the young should be able to vote because their rights are not currently being protected. The young are trampled upon and exploited at every turn. Elected officials respond to votes. They are very much aware of who votes for them and who doesn't. They are very careful to act on the behalf of those groups whose members vote. The young cannot vote, therefore the govenrmnent will never act on their behalf. Instead the government will use them as scapegoats for problems, both real and made up for election day. If the young could vote, things like the CDA or COPA would never see the light of day. Laws such as these which are supposed to "potect children," aren't about that at all. They're about censorship and nothing more. Their creators and backers use the idea of protecting children to justify the stifling of information that they fild personally offensive, usually on superstitious grounds. These are the same kinds of people who have caused oppression throughout the history of mankind. One must be forever vigilant against them and always willing to fight back and never surrender. Lee

  • Re: Simpler and less repressive.. (Score:3)

    by CrayDrygu ( 56003 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @05:43PM (#963565)
    Yes, but that works just as well with the IP hidden. You don't need to know it, just your copy of the client.

    netstat -a

    This leads to one of two scenarios:

    1) You're chatting with the avearge user on ICQ. They won't know if netstat, so if your IP is hidden, they'll never know it (not from ICQ, anyway), and if it's not hidden, they'll have no idea what to do with it.

    2) You're chatting with does know about netstat, which means that whether you tell ICQ to hide your IP or not, they can find out what it is.

    --

  • Putting incorrect data on there is a crime. If you're a kid and you change your age in the profile then they have a responsiblity to contact the appropriate LEA and report the attempted bypassing of a federal law. That itself is a felony.

    So, exactly which federal agency has enforcement responsibility for this law? I don't know where you got your info but do you really think the feds are gonna slap FELONY charges on a 12 year old for lying about his age on ICQ? I work for a municipal LEA and I can just imagine the laughter if you called us attempting to report this bs...

  • <SNIP>I have no feet</SNIP>

    If you have no feet, go get rapped.
  • No, it's not a hoax. The story has been out for some time [icqx.com] and was actually first reported May 5th. UIN #1 is the ICQ server, and is used for sending system messages to clients. The message is legit, as many users have received similar messages before.
  • Forget June 7th, the story was first reported [icqx.com] on May 5th!
  • Recently my 11-year old son came to me and said that he couldn't access his personal profile on Yahoo. He simply wanted to update it since it indicated he was still 9 years old (He had signed up for it when he was 9). They wanted him to get his parent to approve. So I checked it out and and put in my username in the required fields, etc. Then it asked me for my credit card number to verify my age! Their disclaimer indicated there were no charges, it was just for verification, blah blah blah. We decided to create a whole new account instead. It seems you can't do that without a credit card number either.

    My son has a Netscape e-mail account now instead. And when he signed up for we indicated that he was 18. I don't like to teach my child to lie, but I think its important for him to realize that he doesn't need to comply with every stupid regulation and beaurocratic nonsense that comes along. The government and/or megacorporations should not entitled to stick their nose into every nook and cranny of our lives!

  • Actually, no. There are no UINs below 1001, aside from the almost-theoretical UIN 1. Mirabilis staff uins have 5 digits, usually ending in 4 zeroes.
  • It's almost the same thing with registering a free web page with most hosting sevices, only you have to be 14 years of age, if you aren't just change your age, I was born on August 1966 :-)
  • There are also a few questionable UINs in the 4-digit range. Don't ask me how they got them and unfortunately I forget what the numbers are.

  • No impact (Score:4)

    by Wizard of OS ( 111213 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @11:08AM (#963574)
    This has absolutely no impact. Every child below 13 will create a new account stating he's at least 25. There is no way to validate that, so although AOL seems to have taken a step to please the DOJ, it will not stop young childs from using ICQ.

  • A distributed approach is not a bad idea. However, as Gnutella, it would produce huge amounts of traffic. Gnutella needs about 1 KB per connection with another node per second, so it's not exactly suited for your average modem user. And that just for instant messaging, would be overkill. Maybe the traffic could be reduced.

    Any new instant messaging system that is not pushed by a major corporation will probably have a hard time being established. OTOH, it would give the opportunity to create a clean protocol from scratch, different from the crappy one ICQ uses (even the developers say so, IIRC, they never thought it would become that huge). With built-in cryptography for privacy, authentication techniques to reduce spam, a good free C library implementing it to have it on all platforms and other goodies.

  • Re:And why the hell is that? (Score:3)

    by CrayDrygu ( 56003 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @05:54PM (#963576)
    I hope you've realized this from other messages by now, but if not...

    COPA was struck down,

    Yes, it was. What does that have to do with COPPA, the law we're concerned with here?

    and even if that was the reason, what of children outside the US? They wouldn't have been influenced by COPA one bit...

    Yes, they would. American companies, due to COPPA, are not allowed to gather information from children under 13. Not just Americans under thirteen... anyone under 13.

    --

  • My Questio Is This (TimeLine) (Score:3)

    by Seumas ( 6865 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @12:27PM (#963584)
    Why did you just receive an ICQ message about this, considering the TOS was updated with this new requirement on June 7th according to both the cited page in the article (and the page I provided below in another post -- odd that they'd place their TOS in two entirely seperate places)?

    June 7th! More than three weeks ago!
    ---
    seumas.com

  • I don't use ICQ very often, but when I did it was extremely useful to me. I started using ICQ back in 1997 when I was doing some work for a client over the 'net. It made sense, as at the time it was near real-time and private. After I have finished the job, I continued to use it as it seemed a good way of keeping in touch with people.

    Then, suddenly, about 2 months ago, I recieved an e-mail from mirabilis or ICQ or whatever they call themselves now, informing me that as my user details listed me as being under 13, I would have my account deleted within 28 days if I did not change it, or within 2 days or my next log on to the ICQ network. Sure enough, the next time I logged on, I was messaged with a very simialr message. Being a linux user as I was, there was no way to change these details in the user directory using the client I was using, and I couldn't find anything obvious on the web site, so having no other option, I left it.

    And so my account was deleted soon after. I haven't opened another one, partly because of all the hassles of telling everyone my new number, and partly because I don't agree with a company forcing the laws of one country on to a citizen of another (I live in the UK). Nowadays, anyone who wants to contact me is referred to a BBS I frequent, and told to find me there. Unfortunate, but that's the way it is.

    --

  • Every child below 13 will create a new account stating he's at least 25.

    Great, then when a twelve year old kid tries to start a conversation with someone of their own age that other kid will think (s)he is dealing with a pedophile (sp?).

  • Then maybe kids should be given the vote.

    -- iCEBaLM
  • Actually, here in the UK, it's illegal for under-18s to have credit cards (Consumer Credit Act).

    Actually, I think this is a Good Thing (TM)... for a start, it means you can't run up huge fictitious debts... (as an example, why not take Bart Simpson, who in one episode got sent a credit card application addressed to his dog?)

    And as for ICQ doing this...what about those of us who aren't in the good ol' US of A? I'm 15, so this doesn't count, and I don't use ICQ or AIM or, indeed, any AOL produce (apart from Winamp), but this kind of thing scares me. Why can't we just teach our children not to enter in personal information, or not to trust that tempting 12-year old 49-year old who wants to meet with you? That would certainly be better than locking them out of services that would be useful to them ... like ICQ.

    Does anyone else say overkill? I do.
  • Jabber [jabber.org] is a non-centralized free IM system. It is based on open standards, with free (GPL) implementations. The Jabber protocol has been submitted to the IETF instant messenging group as a proposed standard.

    The protocol and server just hit 1.0; this is a real, working system. Good clients are available for X11 and Win32, and are in progress on other platforms.

    Jabber is interoperable with AIM, ICQ, and (soon, at least) IRC and e-mail. Interoperability is server-side, so that clients don't need any changes to support new protocols.

  • ICQ has blocked 13 users for a long time. (Score:5)

    by Bushwacker ( 101443 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @03:11PM (#963609) Homepage
    I've been using ICQ (Windows) for about 8 months, and it has had the same policy all the time. "Anyone under 13 cannot have an account. If you're found to be 13, you'll be terminated..." It may be new to the various GNU/Linux ports, but It's VERY old news for ICQ users in general.

  • Um. Did you read the article? (Score:5)

    by Seumas ( 6865 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @12:34PM (#963612)
    The article linked to a page on ICQ that stated the same thing. I also linked to a second instance of that page in this post [slashdot.org].

    Further more, yes there are (at least, there WERE) ICQ numbers beneath 1,000. They were reserved for a number of friends of the software originators and the staff when it was wholly owned by Mirabilis. I'm not sure whether these still exist, but I imagine they do.
    ---
    seumas.com

  • This is what I was speaking about and have been keeping a distant eye on for awhile. However, it is my understanding that Jabber has a seperate client and server which means that there are still issues of being globally connected (I assume you can only access other users who are logged into the same system?). This also doesn't remove the liability far enough, since there are still identifiable 'servers' as opposed to 'hey, we're all clients here'.

    Jabber is a great idea and I hope it becomes a success, but I think that a larger 'distributed' model is called for -- or will be, eventually. With the current model for 'distributed' networks, a reliable system probably is not wholly feasible, but there must be a way with some modifications to make such a system, altered from the current Gnutella-like service.
    ---
    seumas.com

  • > COPPA states that a website may not KNOWINGLY require or track personal information (age, name, address, email
    > address, etc) of anyone underage. All ICQ has to do to remove itself from any concern is take the age category out of
    > their demographic marketing information gathering registration section. Suddenly, they'll no longer knowingly be
    > tracking anything from a child under 13.

    So all we have to do is bribe^H^H^H^H^Hlobby enough scumb^H^H^H^H^Hrepresentatives to s/13/999/g in the law, and at least America will be rid of Doublefuck and the rest of their ilk for once and for all :-)

  • bullshit

    i am 16 and i can damn well understand the consequences of my actions better then a lot of the adults i know. I am complaining, because the gov't has no right to take away my rights without my say. i am knowledgable enough to decide for myself what is right and wrong.

    if minors can be charged as adults in court after they committ crimes, then they should be considered adults all the time. you cant have it both ways.

    i understand you'll have to take my word for it, but i cant believe they let some of the idiots (adults) in the USA (where I live) vote and I cant. Im sorry, but there is no reason for that.

    You can vote even if you have no idea about what the voting process is or what it does or even who you are voting for, if you are over 18. I understand all those things, better then a lot of adults most probably, and I cant vote.

    Someone please explain why.

  • To address a U.S. law aimed at protecting idiots' privacy, we cannot permit people with an IQ under 70 to use the internet. Your profile presently shows you are an idiot (Remember that post you made saying "Me Too"? What the hell were you thinking?). Therefore, we will close your account within 48 hours. If you are an idiot, you may open an account only after you stop being an idiot (i.e. never). We regret any inconvenience

    That will take care of the entire AOL userbase.

  • Of course you can say that. That IS the logical thing to think... But this does acoomplish something... It takes away AOL's liability for a crime. This measure was taken so AOL doesn't have to sufficiently police their own systems, and since there is no law requiring a more stringent age verification system, this action is legally enough to remove AOL's liability.
  • ICQ User #1 is in fact the admin of ICQ ... it's the user number that gives system messages

  • uin #1 (Score:2)

    by nc ( 70697 )
    for those interested, icq UIN #1 is the "System" account, i.e. the windows icq client treats messages from this UIN as special messages, coming not from an user but from the mirabilis team.

  • Why the "-a"???

    Um...probably because I was still dazed from the concert the night before. Heh.

    --

  • Unfortunately, COPA makes complying with it extremely expensive, and the risk of a lawsuit is just too high. I run a small web site and have also been forced to post "please don't use this service if you're under 13" on certain places that collect personal information, such as discussion group forums which collect e-mail ID, etc. for verfication purposes.
  • Name: 12yroldkid
    Age: 25
    Comment: Yeah Im 12, so sue me!
  • Instead of killing people's UINs, they should've just done the other half of the job for themselves too -- "Hi. We noticed that your age and/or birthday as stated in your profile indicates that you're under the age of 13. Since you agreed to our user policy when you signed up, you must be over the age of 13 and thus lying on your profile. Your age has been reset to 13, and the birthday adjusted accordingly. Please do not lie in your profile in the future."

  • AOL/ICQ requires all users of the service to be over the age of 12, regardless of geography. Possibly, because AOL is based in Virginia and subject to US Law.

    This seems strange, however, as the 'victims' of any privacy invasion would not be located within the jurisdiction of the United States and, in fact, wouldn't even be an American citizen, which means that the government here has no obligation nor any right to enforce legal 'protection' upon citizens of other countries.
    ---
    seumas.com

  • You're right. But I think alienating the 13-17 crowd would kill ICQ's bread and butter. Most of their users are high school kids, as far as I can tell... which makes me wonder about why I always get spammed with porn when I make the mistake of loading up that thing.
  • the similarly-acronymed COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which regulates what websites can do to invade the privacy of children under 13, and which has not been struck down nor even challenged.

    The ICQ program is not a website. And the icq.com website itself doesn't require any personal information. I don't see how COPPA is any more related, then, than COPA.

    COPPA states that a website may not KNOWINGLY require or track personal information (age, name, address, email address, etc) of anyone underage. All ICQ has to do to remove itself from any concern is take the age category out of their demographic marketing information gathering registration section. Suddenly, they'll no longer knowingly be tracking anything from a child under 13. To them, everyone will simply be a 'user' or a 'member'.

    In fact, removal of an age section is the solution many sites and services have used. The only problem is that a lot of companies grasp onto their precious marketing-machine to gather data on every aspect of their users and they find it more valuable to track ages than to allow the younger set to enjoy the use of ICQ (and other services) too.

    Also, if I recall, doesn't this only apply to commercial services? Does ICQ (since it provides a free service without advertisements) even fall under the commercial service regulation? I suppose it probably does... Still, this whole thing is rediculous.
    ---
    seumas.com

  • How About A Distributed Messaging Service? (Score:4)

    by Seumas ( 6865 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @12:58PM (#963678)
    ICQ and AIM are centralized. They have servers that all globally connected clients must go through. But what if someone created a 'Gnutella-like' messaging system with as much popularity? I haven't checked on the Jabber project in quite some time, so I'm not sure if that falls into this category. I don't believe it does; it still requires servers, but they aren't quite as centralized and controlled.

    No, what I'm looking forward to is a fully distributed system of communication where every client is also a sort of server. De-centralize the control and operation of such a system and you also shrug off the responsibility and legal implications of it. How do you stop 60,000,000 freely distributed and connected clients?

    There would also be less interest in such a sytem, for tracking personal data for demographic databases. I don't believe COPPA refers to any information provided where a person says "I am 12 years old and my email address is haxorboy@hotmail.com". It applies, if I read it correctly, to the collection of this information. Thus, on a distributed system, there would be no centralized databse with a collection of this information. If the user is connected to the network and has entered their age or email address or other information into their 'profile', that profile remains on their system and cannot be searched, archived or otherwised gathered and manipulated. Once they disconnect, all about them is removed from availability until they connect once again.

    Maybe that's dumb. I dunno. It just seems like a better solution.
    ---
    seumas.com

  • Freenet could be used as a base for instant messanging. The Freenet project is looking for application writers to create protocols over Freenet.

    Is anyone still reading this thread?

    I have already made an informal proposal - the Nominis Network Presence protcol - along those lines. Nominis concentrates narrowly on net presense and message forwarding. These are the only two things in IM you absolutely need a server for.

    I have a lot of respect for the Jabber initiative, but when it comes to secure, distributed network presence, putting all the processing in the server is just the wrong way to go. Let alone your contact list. Jabber is really intended as a messaging bridge and standard IM protocol and it runs on the server so all the protocol details are handled there. When you don't have a whole lot of different protocols to deal with it becomes a much better strategy to do everything in the client, except for the things that the client can't possibly do.
    --
  • it's a good thing they did that, because we know that all 13 year olds are entirely too computer illiterate to lie about their age in an incredibly complex system such as ICQ.

    Thank you, ICQ, for putting your foot down and saving america from itself.
  • This is probably the really obvious thing to ask...but did anyone else receive this message? I wonder if it couldn't have been someone who compiled licq with --spoof-uin (or whatever the compile-time option is) and sent a message from UIN #1 that way. It sounds much like the usual "ICQ will delete so-and-so accounts if you don't forward this message" spam that goes around once in a while.

  • Before You Freak Out (Score:5)

    by Outlyer ( 1767 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @12:06PM (#963697) Homepage
    Remember, this is not the same as the Core fiasco. Strictly speaking, anything like ICQ which provides not only communications and reveals things like IP addresses, can be construed as privacy invasion. Simply speaking, children under 13 cannot legally waive these rights. AOL is only covering itself from a lawsuit, in the case of a pedophile or someone else arranging a meeting. I don't think it's an afront on freedoms, but I'm over thirteen, so maybe I'm biased.
    I would think AOL and ICQ would be covered by common carrier priveledge in the case of a lawsuit, but American's are so sue-happy that someone will end up suing them anyway.
  • I had just installed mandrake 7.1 beta just after this message had been sent out. seems that the GnomeICU had set my date of birth to Jan. 1st, 1999. the next morning, I found that my UIN had been deleted. even numerous emails questioning what had happened went unanswered. The final result was that I lost my UIN, because the people at Mirabilis/AOL, in all their infinite wisdom, felt that I was an extremely intelligent 17-month-old baby boy.

    I'm just the prodigal son, aren't I?
    bleh.

  • I thought that ExTrans was "broken" for a long time. Now I've found out that ExTrans is finally working as designed. It just isn't very clear what it's supposed to do.

    If you want to bold your text, choose "Plain Old Text", and put any of the "Allowed HTML" tags listed below it into your message.

    If you have to post *about* HTML, and want to have HTML show up in your message, as you posted above, then choose "ExTrans". In other words, any HTML tags that ExTrans finds it TRANSLATES to plain text so that the HTML code appears in your post.

    IMHO, both options I listed are badly named. The other option, HTML formatted, allows more HTML but not (for example) pre tags -- so I couldn't show you exactly what I meant in each example.
    ----
  • Therefore, would requireing a credit card not count as discrimination? At that point, you're not keeping kids out, which is legal, you're keeping anybody who doesn't have a piece of plastic out, which seems to me to be an artifical exclusion, which, again, seems to me to be illegal.

    It may be stupid and unfair, but it isn't illegal. It would be illegal to discriminate against a protected class, such as by gender, race, religion etc. The applicable federal law can be found here [cornell.edu].

  • I got the same message about two months ago. I had set my info to 8 as a joke. I was _shocked_ to see this message I was checking the uin.. thinking shurely this was a hoax. It was from UIN zero... Ahh... I guess you can no longer set humorous info on icq... maybe I'll just set it to 85 now...

  • Thank goodness I live in a country that teaches its children from the time they are 13 that you have to lie to obtain basic human rights... like ICQ

  • Boo hoo. (Score:4)

    by generic-man ( 33649 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @01:42PM (#963728) Homepage Journal
    So kids will now have to lie to get an account on ICQ. Big deal. Out of curiosity (and desperation, I know) I visited Yahoo! Personals [yahoo.com] to see just what kind of women place personal ads on-line. Apparently two kinds do:
    • People advertising pornography, and
    • Women under the age of 18.

    Per their terms of service, Yahoo! doesn't allow users under 18 to post personal ads. However, a lot of the non-porn ads state that the woman's age is 18 in the header, and then the first sentence of the body is "hi im actually 16/f but they wouldn't let me put 16."

    Unless they start doing age verification through more trusted sources (can you say privacy invasion?) on the Internet, nobody will know you're a minor.
  • The link between the two is getting thicker every day. Try logging into AOL Instant Messenger using your ICQ user number as your "screen name." AOL owns ICQ, so ICQ users can no longer feel all warm and elitist about their choice of messaging software.

  • This Has Only To Do With Your PROFILE (Score:5)

    by Seumas ( 6865 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @12:09PM (#963737)
    Like the message said, the PROFILE stated the person was under 13. ICQ offers you the option of opting out of providing any information about yourself, including your age on the profile section of the installation (or new account creation).

    COPA (which I understood had been repealed) only required that places which REQUIRE or SOLICIT personal data from children under the age of 13 acquire parental permission.

    ICQ does not require this data. Thus, don't provide it and ICQ won't have any compelling reason to remove your account. This is not 'circumventing' anything by proving no (or fake) information, since it is never required to begin with.

    Also, I have to wonder how this effects users outside of United States jurisdiction.
    ---
    seumas.com

  • The message he recieved may be a hoax, but if you follow the link to the Tos/aup/whatever on ICQs page, it states that you have to be over 13 blah blah blah, so, even if the contact from UIN#1 was fake, the information behind it is not.

  • I wish Slashdot would have a different category for stories like this. Misusing the word censorship just dilutes the important meanings, such as government making certain political speech illegal.


    --

  • To add some quasi-official commentary to pieces of this thread...

    Jabber is decentralized in the same sense that email is. Just as every ISP or organization runs its own email server, they can run their own Jabber server. However, your roster (the Jabber term for what That Other IM System calls a "Buddy List"(R)(C)(TM)) may contain users on any Jabber server; when one of the people on your roster sends you a message, or presence information, or whatever, their server contacts your server, which passes it on to you. It's not quite as decentralized as a Gnutella/Freenet setup, but it's a lot more convenient for the end user. And there's nothing stopping you from running a personal Jabber server on your own box (or your site's NAT box, or whatever); if you've got a DNS name pointing to that box, other Jabber users on other servers will still be able to add you to their rosters, and will get your messages and presence as they would anyone else's.

    Jabber IDs are expressed as "user@server," just like email addresses; this would make it easy for an ISP to give its users Jabber IDs identical to their email addresses, and with the same passwords for authentication, if desired (assuming they set up authentication correctly). In fact, Jabber IDs may include a third element, the "resource" (making the Jabber ID format "user@server/resource"), allowing a user to log into Jabber multiple times, from different locations and/or different devices.

    Since everything in Jabber is done through the server, clients can be very simple. Even so, they can support connectivity to other IM networks (such as ICQ, AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, and IRC) via services known as "transports" that are run on the server side and translate between the Jabber protocol and "foreign" IM protocols. (Incidentally, if you use the IRC transport to access IRC from Jabber, the IP address the IRC people will see is the IP address of your Jabber server. This is both good and bad; good because they don't see your real IP and hence can't portscan you, bad because it makes it easier for server admins to block all Jabber users if they get honked off at us.) An administrator can install a transport, and the users of that server can begin using it immediately, without any changes required to client software.

    Finally, in regard to the topic of this article: Jabber can collect personal information about its users, if (and only if) they choose to provide it. (It stores it on the server, and in the Jabber User Directory, in the proposed XML vCard format.) This information can (but need not) include birthdate and/or age. How this will balance with the requirements of COPPA is a subject that has been weighing on my mind for awhile now. My gut reaction is "we just write the server; it's up to whoever runs it to follow the policy," but in some senses, that's kind of a cop-out. Perhaps one of the things Jabber.com should work on is a system to catch all users who have entered birthdates that would make them less than 13 years old (i.e., before July 3, 1987, as of the day I'm writing this) and send them notices and/or automagically delete them. In essence, we would be enabling a Jabber server administrator to do exactly what ICQ is now doing. I know that some people might view this as caving in to The Man, but, as the saying goes, "Dura lex, sed lex." ("The law is hard, but it's the law.") I'm sure ICQ doesn't like the thought of having to take this kind of action any more than I do, but...

    For more information about Jabber, visit one of our Web sites, the JabberCentral [jabbercentral.com] site, the open-source development [jabber.org] site, or the company I work for. [jabber.com]

    Disclaimer: I'm one of the core Jabber.org developers, and an employee of Jabber.com, Inc., but I don't necessarily set policy or speak for either organization.

    Eric J. Bowersox
    Software Engineer, Jabber.com Inc. (subsidiary of Webb Interactive Services, Inc.), Denver, CO
    Developer, Jabber Project (author, ICQ transport)
    --

  • Ok, just a notice to the Slashdot admins...If anyone takes away my account because im 7 1/2, someone is going to get their anus haX0red. SwiftBob :-:mp3.com/PhysicsOfASquall
    -Swift ::
  • Marketers are less likely to spam people they think are under the age of 13. No credit card and less interest in porn than adults. I'm glad /. doesn't ask age, adults signing up as children would throw off the demographics so much that you might get Twinkie Winkey as our moderator.
  • I completely agree. I find that usually with these things most people overlook the group they're affecting. Several examples, beginning with this one:

    As many people have already said, nobody is going to be unable to use ICQ because of this. But.. because a lot of children do want to use it, they're going to have to lie about their age. Was that ever considered? Is it better to have laws that make companies introduce stupid policies like this, which in turn encourage children to lie, than to assume 'kids' can take care of themselves?

    Then take the current 'war on drugs.' Can the authorities possibly win? No. But.. the fact that they're fighting means that the drug trade has gone underground, and become more violent, less safe, etc. If the feds would lay off a bit, addicts would be able to get drugs more safely, and be able to get cleaner drugs, as well as help to get them off. But of course it's better to oppose something illegal, simply because it's illegal, rather than to make things safer for those involved.

    This really annoys me, every time it comes up, and ICQ is just another case. I myself am a 'child,' or at least I was recently. I'm 16. I absolutely *hate* it when people patronize me and essentially tell me that I'm too young, too innocent, or whatever, to do something.

    Don't bitch that because I don't pay taxes I don't get a say in what goes on.. don't bitch that because I don't vote I don't have rights. I'm affected by what goes on.. and that should be reason enough for me to have a say.

    Children under 13 were never consulted before this went into effect. Nobody said 'look, sickos might be able to get info about you if you use ICQ and we're thinking of banning people under 13 from the service.. what do you think?' How does the government know what's best for children under 13? How does AOL or ICQ know?

  • What about OFIPA? (Score:3)

    by Grant Elliott ( 132633 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @02:09PM (#963762)
    What we really need is OFIPA (Old Fogie Internet Protection Act). After all, who is it who actually to fall for stupid viruses like ILOVEYOU? Who asks the most questions to tech support? Worst of all, who actually believes AOL is the internet? Besides, how many of them would realize that all they neecd to do is change the birthday they listed? It wouldn't really protect them from the internet; it would protect the internet from them.
  • Could have been CmdrTaco trolling ICQ under the innocent guise of a 12 year old. Heh.

    Also, it isn't 13. It's 12. The law (last I read it) was specifically with regard to children UNDER the age of 13. Teenagers are not part of the age-group this law deals with.
    ---
    seumas.com

  • They aren't trying to protect anyone but themselves. They're covering their backsides so they don't have to deal with the U.S. Child Online Protection Act.

    They hope to be able to say
    But, your honor, our company
    couldn't have collected any information on children under 13 or exposed them to anything indecent, because (wink, nudge) we don't allow them on our service!
    Meanwhile, they're doing this knowing full well, as has been pointed out, that those under 13 will just enter whatever age will allow them access to the servers. And probably selling ad space based on targeting an under 13 demographic, if the sales department misses the memo from legal.

  • How can you say anything about old men posing as 13 year old boys when you have committed and admitted to commiting perjury? Smooth move buddy.
  • Hrmph. Teenagers have the largest amount of disposable income of any demographic. 13 year olds are right about at the edge of the age where they start consuming alot more.. I suspect anyone around that age who just got their account shutoff will not be willing to suggest their friends go to AOL... or their parents.

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