Slashdot Mirror
EU Commissioner Calls For Censorship of Web Search
An anonymous reader sends us a Reuters story on a statement yesterday by Franco Frattini, the EU Justice and Security commissioner, who believes that Internet searches for bomb-making instructions should be blocked across the European Union. The commissioner "intend[s] to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector... on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism..."
Seems like a good idea to me if it protects the kids...after all, the world did change on September the 11th
Not another one.
will they block slashdot now?
So, following your example, if you saw an active terroristic threat, the thing you'd do to alert others would be to post it on a blog and wait for search engines to catch up, and then the unexploded lucky ones could read about it on the intertubes?
Makes sense. I was thinking more of calling the police first on a phone, but I must be getting something wrong.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
The obvious solution is to allow access to all information, but set up rules that send alerts on who is searching for the offending words, and disallow anonymous web use, if that even still exists.
Make using the web at all require a login.
Issue copyrights on all information related to manufacturing explosives. Turn over the copyrights to the RIAA. Oh, wait ...
[Insert pithy quote here]
Apparently there are detailed instructions on genocide online..
We wouldn't want the kids to accidentally start wiping out entire races by accident, you know with those genocide machine schematics online.
www.how-to-make-a-bomb.eu
(The domain's freshly registered so DNS might not be working everywhere yet).
I was a substitute teacher for a chemistry class. We were discussing reaction rates as part of the class material, and I pointed out that a local flour mill explosion was the result of a flour/air mix that was ignited by a spark or over-heated equipment. The flour particles could oxidize (burn) extremely quickly because they were suspended in air, and being contained in an inflexible building the pressure from all those hot gases shattered the building, as opposed to another local fire in a grain silo that was still smoldering after two weeks because the paticles were large and air supply was limited.
On my return to that school, some days later, I was blamed for teaching the students how to blow up the trash barrels! Extrapolating from my information that flour/air mixes can go KABOOM, they shook flour into a barrel from a large kitchen shaker (the kind used for powdered sugar spreading), jammed on the lid, and gave it a spark from a battery-powered circuit. It was apparently an impressive KABOOM, although maybe not an earth-shattering one, and the trash barrel looked like it had been run over by a large truck.
sigs are hazardous to your health
Similarly, if I were looking to diffuse a bomb, I might need to research different types of bombs to learn ... ... how strong the lens will need to be to withstand the blast?