Question: When did anonymous text chat jump the shark?
Answer: Today.
A Russian website called CyberLover.ru is advertising a software tool that, it says, can simulate flirtatious chatroom exchanges. It boasts that it can chat up as many as 10 women at the same time and persuade them to hand over phone numbers.
The program, so far available only in Russian, will go on sale around February 15, just after St Valentine’s Day, said the CyberLover.ru website.
The CyberLover.ru site denied the program did anything wrong, saying it only gathered information that chatroom users themselves were volunteering.
Yeah right. We’re not doing anything wrong here. That’s what gun manufacturers say. It’s not us, it’s the people that use our products that are capable of evil.
There have been tools to integrate third-party programs with IM and chat rooms for years, but this appears to be the most recent, realistic and scary instance of tools put out in the open that are explicitly developed for harming people. Screenshots are some Russian dialect, check out the Google translation of the site.
All depends on the scenario of conduct program, which you have chosen. You can get the girls to drum up your ICQ, offering virtual sex for a very sophisticated scheme can be set female nickname and do a script that the program razvodila all muzhikov Ineta for money (for example, requested the code on the card to send $ 5 MTS to call on the phone, on the pretext of that run out of money on my cell) or drum up people to your site. ???? ??? ??????… All anything …
It’s troubling enough that certain upcoming dating sites us “Ambassadors” to engage members. I’m on a dating site, I want to go on dates, why would I want to talk to some minimum-wage drone who’s paid to come-on to members to get them to use the site?
The last thing dating sites needs is chat bots roaming the chat rooms. I wonder if Userplane and other chat systems will respond to these bots, if it’s even possible to identify them?
Anyone who gives up their phone number or other personally identifiable information in a chat room the first time the meet someone should automatically have Geek Squad come over and take away their computer because they are clearly lacking common sense. I’m sorry, but how clueless can you be?
With all the free calling and VOIP internet-based chat solutions available, why would you give up your phone number? Is it an awareness problem, or are certain people simply too trusting? Probably a bit of both.
Full article at Yahoo News.
