Slashdot Mirror
Deutsche Bahn to Sue Google
Many readers including this Anonymous Coward have written about this case: "After the DB-Deutsche Bahn (German railway comp.) won a case against Dutch ISP xs4all to remove 2 articles that were hosted on one of their servers, the DB now is going to sue Google (Wednesday) and probably in 2 days time Yahoo! and Altavista. Infoworld has an article about it. More background information about previous attempts to censor the same site can be found here and here's list of mirrors." And Yes, "Access is Forbidden."
Here's Google's cache of the broken link.
"Deutsche Bahn will file suit in Germany, where all three search engine companies have subsidiaries, because it feels it would not stand a chance in a U.S. court because of freedom of speech allowed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution."
Have these people not been paying attention lately?
Just to clarify its not just the cache, its actually the links and its not to their site but articles that detail how to cut power on parts of the railway system.
Its not *their* site they want removing.
no sig.
What do you mean by "a company such as Google"? If you mean "a company which is popular with geeks and Slashdotters" - well, you're right, in that some of the shine may gradually rub off their geek-friendly, free-speech protecting image. OTOH, plenty of large well-known corporations do business with China, say, or in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,.. ( insert your favourite repressive non-democratic regime...) IBM organised the Holocaust, you know, and Cisco built and support the Great Firewall of China (and who knows who supplies the software tools that pull out Falun Gong-related email from the wire and queue a request for the secret police to pay the poster a visit at 4am?) (actually, it's probably Free software: but that's morally defensible, in that the Free software community are not getting rich supporting repression.)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
First of all, you should read the article, it answers most of your questions.
They already asked google to take it down the hyperlinks and cached copies, but they didn't, so now they're suing
It's a tough situation : a handbook on how to destroy rail tracks is hardly worth fighting for - but even in those instances, freedom of speech must be absolute
but it sucks having to do it over some dangerous wingnuts' propaganda...
It actually is a much longer story (and more interesting), you can read it HERE
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
The regular schedule being "we haven't a clue when we're leaving or arriving either, and yes - you will be delayed along the way". As per every other UK train.
Cheers,
Iam
In other news, www.xs4all.nl will change to www.xs4allexceptcertainanarchistpublications.nl to represent recent events.
Would it not be a better idea for Deutsche Bahn to use their excess cash to:
As the already-present mirrors show, attempting to censor people's right to freedom of speech on the Internet is a futile exercise.
Right, some links on a few search engines are better advertising than numerous news articles describing exactly what the blocked pages contain...
"There is no chance to sue them in the U.S. You are really allowed to put anything on the Internet there,"
Yeah, instructions on hacking railway systems are ok, but you'd better not post instructions describing how to open legally purchased documents "protected" by some form of "encryption."
As someone who works for a major German telecommunications company, I was directly involved in this, in that my office was responsible for giving the DB a 'heads up' about the site (whether or not we found it I'm not sure).
I was asked to take a look at the portion of the site relating to my companies products (which was a guide on how to sabotage them to disrupt train services), and essentially the most elegant intructions given were "Pry the cover off, bash the insides to pieces with a rock, and/or fill it up with dirt/glue/etc".
This was only a few weeks ago too, and this is the first I've heard of any action the DB has taken, but I am quite impressed at the speed at which this has progressed.
(Details have been left vague to give me some semblance of anonyminity, protect my job, etc)
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
We don't need Freedom of Speech protections to protect Aunt Helen's "I love puppies!" website. We don't need them to protect Ed Jones's "The Taliban suck" page. The wingnuts are the people testing the bounds of free speech, and they're the ones who let us know how much of it we can count on.
Some argue that people like this are actually a threat to speech, by inciting the government to crack down so regularly. Personally, I take the opinion that your average government would simply attempt to regulate even less controversial speech-- things like "steal music" or "this politician sucks"-- if they didn't have the wingnuts to keep them constantly tied up in court.
PS I realize we're talking about a private company, in a country without all of the free speech protections of the US. Nonetheless, speech protections are important to us all, and should be fought for no matter where they're threatened. Particularly on the net, where one country's silly laws can potentially be applied to everyone on the planet.
Nice shot at a knee-jerk reaction.
What would I say to such a document? Post it. Link to it. Alert the media. Get CNN to do a cyber-scare article on it. Get people thinking about the state of security in their airports and the danger this represents.
Know why a group of people were able to seize guided missiles for the price of some flying lessons, airline tickets, and box cutters? It wasn't because box cutters are such a formidable weapon. It is because the passangers and crew of those airlines did not expect what was to come. Up to that point, hijackings tended to be isolated events that lead up to a police standoff on the ground. Most of the time, the majority of hijack victoms survived.
The passangers of Flight 93 quickly learned of the fate of other hijacked airlines that day thanks to mobile phones. With the cry of "let's roll" (accredited to Todd Beamer), the passangers of that flight attacked their captors. It cost them their lives as the entire flight went down in a field in western Pennsylvania. But their flight was the only one to not also crash in to a monument and take additional lives on the ground (authorities believe the flight was headed for a target in Washington).
The difference between Flight 93 and other doomed flights that day was a slim margin of knowledge. A realization that the threat was different than the past. Information.
If a group attempted the same tactic today (with box cutters, much less the nail-clippers being confiscated by airport security now), they would meet the same resistance. Additional attempts of airline terrorism (the shoe-bomber being a prime example) has lead to quick action by fellow passangers to subdue their would-be attacker.
What would a document called "10 easy ways to Hijack an airliner and slam it into a building" do? I can tell you what a lack of such a document didn't do - stop the events of 9/11 from happening.