Originally published at: Anonymous chat site Omegle closes down | Boing Boing
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I never even tried it, but I did see some YouTube videos of people using it (which is weird in itself) and it seemed like a really dangerous thing. It was basically the same thing as Chatroulette, right? And had the same problems. Humans aren’t mature enough for an app like that, I think.
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That’s grim.
I’d be curious to know whether Omegle is just smaller and weaker and an easier target; or if this is an instance of the tendency to rank ‘stranger danger’ substantially higher, vs. acquaintance and insider threats, leading people to focus fire on random matching rather than scrutiny on the self-interested matching of team ‘social media’.
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Point-to-point video chat, that’s easy and scales. Making people behave, now that’s hard!
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oh god. it was anonymous video chat? why would anyone subject themselves to that?
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Yep.
Technically, it’s a easy problem with no heavy lifting by the site: Have a list of users wanting to chat, randomly pair them, pass them each others’ IP address, they open a video connection between them, and you’re done!
That part, first draft, is a weekend project, and there are Python examples to crib from.
And then, like the first Dragon-Jhereg War, the jaws of Deathgate swung open. All those complications! 
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Thanks. Although I had seen the name, it was never clear what the site was for and I was unwilling to try it to find out. Now I won’t have to.
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I hadn’t heard of it, but stories like this make the widespread abuse of the site clear. (Warning: disturbing content.)
Leif K-Brooks’ disingenuous statement makes it sound as if Big Internet is trying to stifle the open expression of ideas. He doesn’t mention that the shutdown was part of a $22M settlement of a lawsuit over sexual predation.
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Awww, poor him! And after he worked so hard not to see the inherent problems that should have been obvious from the start, and long after the place had become a pedophile bar.
The platform also did not require age verification up until last year, which consisted of a checkbox asking users if they were above 18, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection said in a Thursday news release.
That’s a big flaming flag of “I don’t give a shit.”
I don’t know how many boxes he checks off:
- His company couldn’t exist if he saw the problem.
- Freeze Peach absolutist.
- Right Libertarian with their curious age-of-consent problem.
- He really liked owning that bar.
But FM.
On the plus side, this idea isn’t likely to fly with the Valley Bros. They can’t harvest much data from a direct point-to-point video link.
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In the remnants of the company is there a data set that AI could be trained on to flag interactions with higher chances of sexual predators?
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