Yahoo shutting down pedo chat

In an agreement with the attorneys general of New York and Nebraska, Yahoo said it will "institute systemwide controls over chat rooms likely to be frequented by child predators," Reuters reports. After barring the creation of any new chatrooms by users in June, according to the Associated Press, Yahoo shut down some 70,000 existing chatrooms with names that suggested the chatrooms were about or supported illegal adult-child sex (11.4% of the 614,000 chatroom names Yahoo reviewed, according to Reuters). The Internet company apparently will reinstitute user-created chatrooms for people 18+, but said yesterday it will "prescreen the names of all user-created chat rooms if it restores the ability to create them…. Should any slip through, Yahoo must purge such chat rooms within 24 hours from when it becomes aware of them," according to its agreement with the attorneys general. "It was not clear how the company would prevent children from signing up as adults," the AP added (if Yahoo has a tech tool for this, it would benefit from licensing it to a lot of blogging sites and other online businesses!). Yahoo has also eliminated the "Teen" chat category, the AP reports. Earlier this year, "an undercover investigator, posing as a 14-year-old while visiting one of those chat rooms, received 35 personal messages of a sexual nature over a single 25-minute period, the attorneys general said. Here's my coverage of this in June.