Category:January 24, 2007

The time is 1300 UTC, on January 24 2007, and this is Audio Wikinews Newsbriefs. (Sound Effect)

Internet meeting website MySpace will start sending online alerts to internet users in certain regions of the United States in an attempt to help find missing children. The website will cooperate with the AMBER Alert system that provides a broadcast bulletin of suspected child abduction.

Last week families of five teenagers, who were sexually abused by adult users from MySpace, sued the website stating that it showed negligence concerning protection of its users'. In 2006, the company hired a former Justice Department prosecutor in order to respond to concerns over its online safety program.

The CEO of MySpace, Hemanshu Nigam, stated that the company has been working with partners and law enforcement in order to find all the possible ways to protect children. The website now asks all its users to have a valid e-mail address to allow tracking down possible predators, and new subscribers will be required to respond to a verification e-mail.

MySpace is also developing new software allowing parents to see public information about their child that the site was given.

Software giant Microsoft has attempted to pay a web log operator or "blogger" to correct a Wikipedia article concerning the Microsoft Office Open XML format. Please note that Wikipedia is also a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikinews.

Doug Mahugh from Microsoft contacted Rick Jelliffe, who is the top technical officer for Sydney computing company Topologi - and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct the article. Wikipedia strongly discourages contributors involved with the subject of an article from editing the article, when a conflict of interest is likely.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said, "We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach," and stated that the proper thing for Microsoft was to air its comments on the discussion page and request someone neutral to make any appropriate changes.

The email Mahugh wrote to Jelliffe reads “Wikipedia has an entry on Open XML that has a lot of slanted language, and we'd like for them to make it more objective but we feel that it would be best if a non-Microsoft person were the source of any corrections.” The email also stated that Microsoft would not stop Jelliffe from disclosing the deal and rather encouraged him to post it on his blog at oreillynet.com. It also reassured that Microsoft did not have to approve any changes he made to the article.

Microsoft spokeswoman Catherine Brooker said she believed the articles were heavily written by people at IBM, which is a supporter of the rival ISO-approved OpenDocument standard used by leading Open Source office suites rather than the controversial Microsoft Office Open XML format.

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This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable. Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication. Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators. Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections. Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age. The text of this article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License