Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Bomb making instructions

Pipe bombs are fairly easy to make, but you can also make them out of cars, trucks, stink bombs, mail, fuel-air, laser guided, fertilizer, molotov, dust, flour, pipe, M-80, you name it. You can make bombs out of all sorts of things, but I'm not going to tell you how. In fact, I haven't got a clue how, but that doesn't stop people from stopping by to ask.
I used to have "bomb making instructions" as the title of my home page (even though I have no idea how to make bombs and never distributed such information). I just love salting search engines with titilating drivel. It was always interesting to crawl through the web log files looking for how many people followed links from search engines looking for bomb making information. There are sometimes a few government and news sites in the logs. More recently, I found entries for people from the following locations looking for bomb-making instructions:

Lithuania On-Line (when did their politics get weird?)
the Mayo Clinic (noted terrorist haven?)
Quite a few from Irish ISPs (including Indigo and Ireland on-line). This is not surprising I guess.
A United Kingdom ISP (tossing them back I guess). Note that there seem to be about twice as many hits from the U.K. sites as from Ireland.
Academic web of Israel. hmm...
Library of Congress
many hits from ISPs in Australia (for some reason).
The Hamilton/Clermont Cooperation Association of Boards of Education Which is more fearsome? Kids learning about the world about them, or parents trying to prevent them from learning?
I'm not sure what to make of this, but clearly some countries are more interested in booms than others. It may be people worried about bombs, or people trying to build bombs. Dunno which.
The news organizations are probably hot on the trail because they like to sensationalize the dangers of free information on the net. No doubt this is linked to the fact that the Internet is a threat to traditional news and information distribution channels. The feds seem preoccupied with suppression of free speech in the name of "law and order".
Some search engines still have my page indexed for "bomb making instructions" because they don't keep crawling pages they have been to already (that's one way you can detect impending death in a crawler company). For example, Infoseek did not visit my site for several years. They used to list my web page titled "bomb making instructions" right below "Senator Feinstein Amendment to Prohibit Distribution of Bomb Making Info On the Internet". I think I finally shamed them into removing the link. I seem to be holding up on google, since they have had me ranked highly for the query "bomb making instructions" since their inception.

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