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Google Urged to Drop Images
Nqdiddles writes "News.com.au is reporting that the head of Australia's nuclear energy agency has called on Google to censor images of the country's only nuclear reactor. While Dr. Smith admits the image is about two years out of date, he also says he doesn't 'want to provide any easy assistance to anyone who wants to interfere with the site.'
Citing the precedent of the blocks of colour over the White House and Treasury buildings, he's critical of their own security, adding 'there's a small area near the middle of the site which is quite secure, but the bulk of our site isn't all that secure' and is easily visible from the road and commercial airline flights. Google has defended the technology, noting the images were six to 18 months old and not detailed enough to zoom in on people."
Way to RTFA.
The minister is complaining about maps.google.com and satellite imagery. Google has already acquiesced to the US government, regarding satellite imagery of the White House and Treasury Buildings.
Google is just licensing the satellite image data from DigitalGlobe and other vendors. It's the same data that Microsoft, TerraServer, NASA, etc. have and is publicly available for everyone with a stamp. My library even has CDs full of (outdated) full-res satellite images of the world.
Asking Google to censor it just means that the "terrorists" will just go to Microsoft's new beta map.
The blocks over the Whitehouse and surrounding buildings is to stop people spotting Secret Service positions etc rather than building layouts.
Here's the HIFAR reactor's website, with information:
http://www.ansto.gov.au/natfac/hifar.html
They have a convenient "how to get to ANSTO" page here (so terrorists can just side step the whole Google earth lookup thing):
http://www.ansto.gov.au/ansto/dir.html
Google is obligated to follow the laws of any country in which it does business. Just thought I'd throw that out there.
Link to satellite images of ANSTO I _think_ that is where it is. I could be wrong, but that looks more like a nuclear facility than anything else in the area. Thanks to ANSTO for providing a map. :)
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Google IS censoring pictures of important buildings in America, and Google's arguments in this case relate to these buildings just as well.
The thing is, it probably isn't Google that is censoring the pictures, but someone who is providing the images to Google. And in many cases, the images are being provided by the US government itself.
Actually, the images of the whitehouse that Google has are not supplied by DigitalGlobe, they are USGS images, which were censored by the USGS themselves, not Google. You can see this by using NASA WorldWind, which uses the same image source as Google does for Washington DC.
The reactor produces radioactive materials for medical, industrial and research purposes and is used for research work into interesting stuff like radioactive damage to materials and high temperature damage to materials (known as creep). The ANSTO guys I've met subcontract out to power stations to do remaining life assesment on high temperature pipework.
The reactor was built in the middle of a large chunk of bushland outside of the city of Sydney, but Sydney grew right up to the fence of the facility.
The Lucas Heights reactor is in the middle of a middle-class suburb. It's about 30 minutes drive from where I live. It's clearly marked on all road maps of Sydney.
You can drive by it, stop and look through the wire mesh fence. You can take photos and the guards will never see you. It is just not possible to conceal the installation form observation formt he road or nearby scrubland. If you call yourself a high school teacher, ANSTO will mail you brochures that would let you work out the floor plan. You can join a tour group or ask for a tour for your own group.
Lucas Heights used to be a desolate piece of bushland next to a military firing range, but then developers were allowed to build the suburbs of Lucas Heights and Barden Ridge there. Two schools a golf course and several sporting fields are only a few hundred metres from the reactor.
From http://www.google.com/remove.html
To remove your site from Google only and prevent just Googlebot from crawling your site in the future, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
-David
Just in case anyone out there was interested its at -34.051675, 150.98044 as far as i can tell. you can see the new reactor being built on left. If you want directions by road try here
I couldnt find an official location on google. And i really dont care about any terrorists getting their hands anywhere near it. the reactor is about the size of a washing machine and doesnt hold all that much material. It supplies mainly medical isotopes and some physics research. Doubt there is enough material for a bomb, and for a dirty (and effective-in terms of death) bomb i would be much more afraid of any caesium containing X-ray machines...
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