users
M&G reporter Internet news service News24 has taken steps to track down and penalise three people who have posted abusive messages on its chat forums.
Complaints have been submitted to the administrators of the abusers’ Internet Service Providers or domains, who may choose what actions – warnings, blacklisting or criminal charges – to take. The rogue users, who posted “offensive”, racist and pornographic material, came from a South African government department (the gov.za domain), a “large South African ISP” and the University of Brunswick in Canada. That’s assuming they were not sufficiently technically canny to disguise their host Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, through which News24 tracked them with the help of the M-Web abuse department. Following growing problems with unacceptable postings on its discussion forums, News24 has instituted a code of conduct and is tracking all its users’ IP addresses. However, the News24 forums do not disclose this IP tracking, which some might well regard as a breach of privacy. Such data can be correlated with marketing databases to build up profiles of surfers’ Internet usage.