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Google Businesses The Internet Censorship

Google Urged to Drop Images 405

Posted by Zonk from the you-don't-need-to-know-this dept.
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 Smith admits the image is about two years out of date, he also says he doesn't 'want to provide any easy assistance to anyone who wants to interfere with the site.'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."
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Google Urged to Drop Images More

Google Urged to Drop Images

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  • Google Tool of Terror!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by DigitalDwarf ( 902246 ) <Wulfdar@nosPam.yahoo.com> on Sunday August 07, 2005 @04:43PM (#13265320)
    Wow, this is right up there with Sadam using CNN to get info on our movements in the Gulf wars.
    • C'mon...if someone wanted to know where their one and only power plant was and Google sensored it, I'm quite sure they'd find it through some other means...lol. In the "information age" as they used to call it, secrets and closed policies just aren't feasable anymore.

      • C'mon...if someone wanted to know where their one and only power plant was and Google sensored it, I'm quite sure they'd find it through some other means.

        Especially now that this story has been posted on Slashdot and hundreds of geeks just went to google to download the image just in case it does get censored.

      • Re:Google Tool of Terror!!! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 07, 2005 @05:54PM (#13265647)
        Furthermore, does anyone find the quotes from Dr. Smith slightly... unreasoned?

        "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," he said.

        Now correct me if I'm wrong, but if he's trying to censor information about the site's security so as to keep that information from potential attackers, wouldn't he be better to avoid volunteering comments like that? Isn't that single comment even more valuable to attackers than the picture itself?

        I imagine a slightly mad scientist... "Now that I have destroyed the aerial photograph, you will never make it past the two guards at the East entrance and the video camera at the North entrance! Muahhahah, and good luck finding the secret entrance under the tall hedges!"

        • Um, but we WANT an attack. (Score:5, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 07, 2005 @07:34PM (#13266009)
          We Australians feel left out. Every time there is a "terror" scare in, say, the US or UK, our forces switch to Super-Ultra-Crazy-High-Look-At-Us-We're-Targets-To o-No-Really-We-Are alert.

          The boys get to play in our Blackhawk helicopters over Sydney and Melbourne, sliding down ropes with slung MP5s, wearing their best Matrix gear, and impressing the hell out of the news chicks.

          It's all part of the great Australian national inferiority complex: we're ashamed of our "Convict Heritage" while desperately trying to convince the rest of the world that we're a 'significant first-world player', and not some minor nation hidden away downunder.

          Really, the lack of terrorist attacks on Australia is so embarrassing to us that we now actually have to point out the insecure targets to the terrorists.

          • Re:Um, but we WANT an attack. (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward
            We're much worse in Canada. After the London bombings, our Deputy PM was on TV saying, "We'll be next!", as if it were a GOOD thing that we'd be targeted by terrorists.

            Then there was a brief uproar about how smart it was to scare the living shit out of the populace with unfounded scaremongering like that, and a bunch of terrorism experts calmly told us that nobody in Al Qaeda cares about Canada.

            So the Deputy PM was on TV again, saying, "Oh yes, they hate us too! And what's more, we're incapable of stoppin
          • Actually, my friend, I must inform you further about this matter. I am a well-known arms supplier in southeast asia, and I supply many of the blackhawks and MP5s your country uses. Terrorists do indeed have plans to attack your quaint little country.

            In fact, just last week I sold a very large shipment to a nice gentleman in Indonesia. The exact purchase is confidential of course, but it did include parts to retrofit vehicles for driving over barricades and some body armour. They are switching from their
        • "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," he said.

          Or wouldn't it just be easier to, say, I don't know, secure the site?

      • Until the Australian government made this complaint, I didn't know that Australia had any nuclear reactors, or that they had only one.

        However, after doing a Google search, I find that that they actually have a concise list of nuclear facilities in a government website [ansto.gov.au].

        And they also have a good number of technical pages on their HIFAR nuclear reactor [ansto.gov.au], which actually looks more than a gas tank than a nuclear reactor. They could always put up some camouflage netting and disguise it so it isn't so noticable fro
        • "However, after doing a Google search, I find that that they actually have a concise list of nuclear facilities in a government website."

          Hey think I hear a knock at you door.

          But seriously folks. Once a secret is out you can't make it a secret again (*avoiding temptation to reference recent political events*).

          I question whether Google should be RETAINING images at all, beyond possibly a small thumbnail. But if an image is on the web I expect to be able to find it using something that calls itself a search

      • Re:Google Tool of Terror!!! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@ y a hoo.com> on Sunday August 07, 2005 @06:03PM (#13265681) Homepage Journal
        Errr, all they'd need to do is look for the white rectangle. Since the guy has already made public that it's clearly visible from a road and an airport, you can then determine WHICH rectangle the reactor must be under.


        After that, the rest is easy. Since it is clearly visible, and since the design of reactors is fairly basic, you should have no real difficulty in identifying the key sections - the water pens for storing the used and new fuel rods will look very different from the block used to house the crew, for example.


        And since the employee has already said that perimeter security is lousy, a recce should be fairly trivial.


        What would someone need to do to cause serious harm? Well, the waste pipe will carry low-level radioactive waste only, but I don't believe it would be beyond a saboteur to hook the output into some critical input (say an air intake, or the water mains for drinking water).


        In other words, they are relying not only on security through obscurity, but also security through apathy.


        Were I in their shoes, I'd say to hell with what Google was publishing, I'd want to know why internal security was lousy and how to improve it BEFORE someone broke in. Google's maps are irrelevent here - what matters is that there's a wide-open nuclear facility that anyone can monitor from a public roadside (by their own admission) and can enter easily (also by their own admission).


        Ask not for whom the bell tolls... When you're beating the damn thing to death with a one tonne mallet!

      • Re:Google Tool of Terror!!! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by katharsis83 ( 581371 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @06:23PM (#13265748)
        "In the "information age" as they used to call it, secrets and closed policies just aren't feasable anymore."

        Really?

        This would seem to contradict you:

        "The Bush administration filed sealed documents with the U.S. District Court in Manhattan in the case that the American Civil Liberties Union brought, aiming to keep hidden dozens of photographs. The ACLU is seeking information on treatment of detainees in U.S. custody.

        The administration incredibly contends that releasing the pictures would violate the Geneva Conventions rules by exposing the prisoners to additional humiliation."
        From: http://www.roanoke.com/editorials%5C28746.html [roanoke.com]

        Hate to say it buddy, but even under FOIA, it often can take up to a decade to get information from the government. This is especially true given this administration's extreme interpretation of Executive Priviledge (can't say Clinton was any better, but at least he was only trying to cover up sex scandals versus real crime). John Roberts' past judicial record is also being kept from the public. For those saying that it's lawyer-client confidentiality, keep in mind who the client is when we're talking about the Solicitor General (hint: it's "We the people...").

        We've a long way to go still before we reach a transparent government.
      • Australia has no nuclear power plants. The ANSTO site is not a power-generating
        facility.

      • if someone wanted to know where their one and only power plant

        It isn't a power plant - nuclear power would not be economicly viable in Australia, especially way back at the time this research facility is built.

        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

  • Why just Google? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by HUADPE ( 903765 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @04:45PM (#13265337) Homepage
    I was under the impression that the images Google used were not copyrighted. Even if Google were to block them or blur them out, what would stop a terrorist from just finding the photo somewhere else?
    • Are you kidding?

      Look at the map! Every single square has '(C) 2005 Google' watermarked on it.

    • Re:Why just Google? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by wfmcwalter ( 124904 )
      Some of the images used by Google are NASA Landsat 7 images, and these indeed aren't copyright. Others are USGS aerial photography and black and white USGS satellite imagery (which I think are declassified corona data) and these aren't copyright either. But google also uses higher resolution satellite images from commercial providers like Space Imaging's IKONOS platform. These are copyright (although Google seems to use lower-resolution versions of these, due surely to cost).

      Anyway, the image in the NE

      • But google also uses higher resolution satellite images from commercial providers like Space Imaging's IKONOS platform. These are copyright (although Google seems to use lower-resolution versions of these, due surely to cost).

        How can you copyright a satellite photo of the earth? Since you're so far away, there's no selection of angle (other than "down"), so it seems to me these are similar to a photograph of any other 2-dimensional object, in other words, not copyrightable.

      • "Google seems to use lower-resolution versions of these, due surely to cost"

        No. IKONOS comes in two resolutions: 1m panchromatic, and 4m color. Quickbird (Digital Globe) comes in 0.5m and 2.8m respectively. Plus, there is also distortion caused by the lossless compression--the resolutions above are available only in TIFF.

        This higher resolution shots look like they're Quickbird because you can see, even through the lossless, that there are people in front of the White House. I don't recall every seeing a per

  • GEarth has nothing to do with it (Score:5, Informative)

    by yellowbkpk ( 890493 ) * on Sunday August 07, 2005 @04:45PM (#13265338)
    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.

  • Why tell the world the site is unsecure ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by LastNickAvailable ( 676709 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @04:46PM (#13265348)
    Alright, all there was was a old blocky picture, and now everyone knows that "the bulk of [the] site isn't all that secure" ... great move Mr head of ANSTO :)
    • I have some information that explains all of this quite easily.

      The head of ANSTO is a terrorist, Trying to set up the Nuclear Reactor for an attack. The idea is to get the insecure areas blocked out on Google Maps. It's a public and deniable way to give them information on how to breach security.

      They've already saved the images to disk, and are just waiting for information on what areas are considered "insecure" before they start planning how to blow it up.
    • Because in classic fashion, the government won't get off their fat arses until someone embarrasses them into it. Since the info in now public, they will be forced into fixing it, thus the head of ANSTO, far from being stupid, is actually quite clever. Which is why he is the head of a nuclear facility.

      Aside from which, the whole "nuclear plant" thing in this case is overblown anyway.... it's a scientific reactor, making fuel for X-ray machines etc. It's not a nuclear power plant as you would think of them. E

  • They better get used to it (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheMeuge ( 645043 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @04:46PM (#13265349)
    I think the world should get used to the fact that restricting the flow of information is going to be more difficult with every passing year. This isn't strategically-important data. If Google was transmitting a real-time high-resolution image, maybe I would agree with the AU gov't, but censoring 2-year-old satellite photos is simply unnecessary. Actually, we should rejoice that this information is available publicly, because in an age where governments can use information to attack the rights of their citizens, it is somewhat comforting to know that their secrets may not be safe from public scrutiny.

  • Smart move. (Score:2, Funny)

    by JPriest ( 547211 )
    Becasue I am sure attacking google and having the story posted to Slashdot will give them the low profile they are looking for.

  • Won't work (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Donny Smith ( 567043 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @04:49PM (#13265366)
    Google aren't the only ones.

    Just today I read about this Australian company that plans to provide **live** satellite feeds (Google Earth in real time).
    And of course there's Virtual Earth and a bunch of other sources.

    But, if the cops one day find Google Earth printouts in some terrorist's bag, well... that won't be good for their PR.

    Actually I'd be surprised if the government already didn't have Google Earth backdoor with alerts set on sensitive locations worldwide.

    • Re:Won't work (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Silvrmane ( 773720 )
      You seem like the right guy to ask:

      What's the best brand of aluminum foil to make a hat from? Reynolds seems like a solid brand, but thats an awfully big company and I suspect that they might have done 'something' to their foil to make it ineffective.

      Thoughts?

    • Re:Won't work (Score:2, Interesting)

      by xiaomonkey ( 872442 )
      But, if the cops one day find Google Earth printouts in some terrorist's bag, well... that won't be good for their PR.

      While this is true, I bet that if they found a more standard road atlas (think a book of maps that people used to keep in their cars in order to find where things were at prior to mapquest, google maps, etc., etc.), then the fact that the guy was carrying one of these would be mentioned only in passing, if at all.

      However, if some people were to hear that the map was from some new fangl

  • Headlines should summarize stories, not obfuscate (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mat catastrophe ( 105256 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @04:49PM (#13265367) Homepage
    So, at first I thought that someone wanted Google to shut down its images service. Then, I read a little bit of the story and thought that Google was being asked to remove images of Australia's reactor. Then, I finally figured out that they were only being asked to censor those images. Now, I have a headache.
  • Because the "blocks" Google has put over the whitehouse obscure sooooooooooooooo much. Would it really be that hard to visually identify the whitehouse?!?! Even with these blocks? You can drive by it and see what it looks like... you can still match up the general overall shape of the building....It isn't like they put a huge block over the whole thing, they blocked out the actual shape of the building!

    • Re:Yeah ok.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @04:54PM (#13265395)
      The blocks over the Whitehouse and surrounding buildings is to stop people spotting Secret Service positions etc rather than building layouts.

      • Re:Yeah ok.. (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mpupu ( 750408 )
        Bit of a contradictory position here.

        If you read all the other replies, it appears that the same information could be obtained from other sources. So, the request doesn't make much sense.

        However, Google IS censoring pictures of important buildings in America, and Google's arguments in this case relate to these buildings just as well. So, while they have no obligations whatsoever, Google seems to be aplying double standards: either drop the bulls**t and stop censoring any images, or start accepting and imple

        • Re:Yeah ok.. (Score:2, Informative)

          by anthony_dipierro ( 543308 )

          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.

        • Besides, I don't know how 18 months old pictures of secret service positions could be useful to a terrorist.
          It would be reasonable to assume that the Secret Service has mapped out a bunch of sweet spots they like to stock with snipers and the like. By conducting surveillance of the building over several months, one could conceivably get a good idea where there's likely to be agents at any given time. So while the Google picture might only show one subset of sweet spots, that's more information than none at
      • I wonder how many people have tried to fly a kite with camera attached, near the Whitehouse in a nearby park?
        • I wonder how many people have tried to fly a kite with camera attached, near the Whitehouse in a nearby park?

          Well, if anyone's tried, they're in Cuba right now and we sure aren't going to hear about it anytime soon.
    • it's only matter of time when another similar service from a non-us company enter the market, and it will not feature those censors on white house..
    • Well, those blocks are supposed to hide stuff on the top of those buildings, like AA sites.

  • Hypocritical? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SlashEdsDoYourJobs ( 905360 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @04:54PM (#13265394) Homepage

    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.

    If he doesn't want to "provide any easy assistance to anyone who wants to interfere with the site", then why is he publically pointing out the weak spots of their security?

    • And who is Dr. Smith to talk anyway? He was clearly a danger to Will and Penny and the rest of the Robinsons, and he botched every attempt they had at getting saved.

    • If he doesn't want to "provide any easy assistance to anyone who wants to interfere with the site", then why is he publically pointing out the weak spots of their security?

      Oh, that's an easy one.

      Because he's a mind numbingly stupid ass hat.

      This [amazon.com] was his management and administration reference source

  • Hypocrites (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tbo ( 35008 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @04:54PM (#13265403) Journal
    If Google is willing to cooperate [opendemocracy.net] with China on their "Great Firewall"--an attempt to suppress democracy-related information and control the Chinese people--they can hardly object to this. Google has already demonstrated its willingness to cooperate with totalitarian governments in suppressing peaceful, pro-democracy information. Hard to see how they can draw a line now. If anything, Google's "Don't be evil" motto requires them to actively try to subvert Chinese censorship.

    Australia is making a reasonable request that Google voluntarily censor a very small number of images of a nuclear reactor--images that could clearly be used for violent and dangerous terrorist activity. Aside from satisfying idle curiosity, there aren't many important, legitimate uses for those images.

    Since Google has long since slid down the slippery slope, why stop now?

    • Re:Hypocrites (Score:2, Informative)

      by TedCheshireAcad ( 311748 )
      Google is obligated to follow the laws of any country in which it does business. Just thought I'd throw that out there.
    • Google had to make a choice, is China better off with a government censored version of google, or no google at all? We all know how censoring the millions of little website around the web is impossible, look at US attempts to censor porn (which generally doesnt even try to hide it's message). But censoring the tools to find that information is easier. If Google didnt make token compliance, China would have no google at all. Who are the Chinese better off with, google search with Chinese censorship or a
      • I'm getting tired of the "Are the Chinese better off with no Google/Microsoft at all".

        The answer is yes, they're better off with companies not acting as collaborators to their own opression.

        The original poster makes a valid argument, if they're willing to censor political dissent in one country, it makes no sense if they're not willing to censor something made in a more "free" country like Australia, that is security related. Ideally, google wouldn't have to do anything, but since they have already tweaked
        • It still doesnt make sense. China was in a position to force google to censor to do business in their country. Australia isn't in the same position (well they could try but I have a feeling Australians would be awful mad when the government breaks google). If google is against internet censorship, then why go along with Australia when they don't have to? Especially because the demand is so ridiculous (the exact same images are available from many other sources). Whether google's choice is right or wron

  • This is only going to get worse (Score:3, Interesting)

    by confusion ( 14388 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @04:54PM (#13265405) Homepage
    I predict that this is the first of many to come. As resolution increases and this technology becomes more mainstream, we're going to see real-time or near real time images and most likely an archive.org style site where you can shift backward in forward in time whilest looking at a site.

    Governments are going to just love that...

    Jerry
    http://www.cyvin.org/ [cyvin.org]
  • ..it would be hypocritical for them to not work out a compromise with the Australian agencies which would allow for the images to not be indexed in the search engine. They censor plenty of stuff for the Chinese government as is.

    That being said however, I think that if the Australian government doesn't want pictures to be observered, they should not be putting them on the internet in the first place.
  • "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," he said.

    Essentially, the original concern was over a satellite image. I probably never would haved looked at that image.

    That said, now the concerned fellow has told me that his site is insecure, for the most part, and that I could just walk in there anyway.
    • You didn't notice that the entire building is actually the radius of a nuclear blast away, did you? Smart of them to move it around ..
    • Not sure. You'd probably do more damage to the world destroying Google's headquarters than destroying some Australian nuclear site, and if you managed to actually break in to Google's servers you'd probably have access to millions of bank accounts (via the "email me a new password" feature so many banks have).

  • More details (Score:3, Informative)

    by yellowbkpk ( 890493 ) * on Sunday August 07, 2005 @04:57PM (#13265420)
    Here's the HIFAR reactor's website, with information:

    http://www.ansto.gov.au/natfac/hifar.html [ansto.gov.au]

    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 [ansto.gov.au]
  • I got the impression that google's images just went and scooped up whatever images it finds on various web sites.

    If that power company didn't want a picture of their reactor on the web then why did they put one on their web site?

    Assuming it was a mistake and they took it down, why is it news that they are asking google to remove that image? Google seems to be decent enough about that sort of thing.
    • Here's a radical idea.... before asking stupid qustions, click on the damn article, or at least read some of the previous comments.

      It's satellite images on Google Maps they're talking about
  • and is easily visible from the road and commercial airline flights.


    If that is so, what difference would it make if you took it off google? They would just fly in as a tourist, or drive by the plant, and take way better photos then anyone could find on the web...where most images are tiny and compressed to conserve bandwidth, et al.

  • DANGER Will Robinson! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @05:02PM (#13265452) Homepage Journal
    Now that we can all communicate with email, the Web, digital images, and other comm tech quickly, cheaply, and easily, lots of fake "security" that we've all paid $billions (A$2billions ;) is starting to look like complete crap. So instead of admitting "we're finally busted", officials of high-risk systems like Dr. Smith, Oracle's Security Chief [slashdot.org], and a cavalcade of American Homeland Security / Defense Department / National Security Administration (isn't that all redundant?) bureaucrats are screaming for us to "stop looking". Every country and big (and small) corporation has their counterparts. Their emperors wear no clothes, so we should just avert our eyes, and keep handing over all that cash and power. Someone get these frauds out of the way before someone gets really, seriously hurt.

  • Brilliant (Score:2, Insightful)

    by t_allardyce ( 48447 )
    So now a nuclear reactor that most people neither new or cared about and that probably had very few searches will now be looked at by 1000's of slashdotters, blog readers and surfers and probably cached and saved on a million different machines never ever to be lost. Nice job.

    I bet this was one of those lame PR stunts where they say 'oh no you have to censor this' so everyone looks at it and in fact gives them more publicity - they were probably just frustrated that no-one had ever tried anything!
  • Oh no!!! I just found that Google Maps has an image of the area where I live!! Now the terrorists can discover that I have a TV and they'll blow me to smitherines!!! I must get it censored!! damn google for providing this to them evdil terr0rist0rzzz!!
  • ...but the bulk of our site isn't all that secure...


    And that's Google's fault?

  • Contagious censorship (Score:3, Insightful)

    by D4C5CE ( 578304 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @05:14PM (#13265501)
    "Citing the precedent of the blocks of colour over the White House and Treasury buildings..."
    Lessons learned:
    Don't ever even start censoring - it always becomes unstoppable.
  • Why the press release? Why not just quietly ask Google to remove? If it was a security risk before, it certainly is now with everyone looking.

  • this seems to be the beast (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Link to maps.google.com [google.com]

    Not sure though...

  • Seems to be the new mantra. Stupid enough that you put up images of your insecure nuclear reactor? Why, harsh out all those people who link to it! Stupid enough you have a security hole that could bring down the entire backbone? Why, threaten the security experts with jail if they let anyone know about it! Don't like the photos some striking unionist has posted? Block his site instead of getting a C&D order!

    Gahd.

  • Link to Google Map's Sat Images (Score:5, Informative)

    by imemyself ( 757318 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @05:41PM (#13265595)
    Link to satellite images of ANSTO [google.com] 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. :)
    • That's definitely it. I found it on my own, then came to see if anyone had a link already and I found your post, which agrees exactly on the location. It was a bit annoying to find since google maps doesn't have roads for Australia. I got most of the information I needed from the site itself, and this [mapw.org.au] anti-nuclear site which gave a handy map.
  • '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'

    Whoa now! You are worried about old blurry satellite photos, when you just gave away information like that? I suspect one person is out of a job...

  • Solution (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kohath ( 38547 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @05:44PM (#13265607)
    Build 10 or 20 more nuclear power plants so you won't have to worry about having a "most sensitive" site.
  • How would putting "blocks of color" over the buildings, like the ones over the white house, help CSIRO? The resolution of the CSIRO images are pretty low, and things like the layout of the fences are probably more important for them.

  • PUL-LEASE -- GIMME A BREAK !!! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by constantnormal ( 512494 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @06:21PM (#13265743)
    Hasn't it been already established that terrorists are not going after the guarded targets like nuclear reactors and such, using bioweapons, captured nukes or dirty bombs and the like?

    Let's review some notably successful attacks and see if we can learn something...

    • In the destruction of the WTC, they used airline tickets and box cutters to commandeer commercial airlines and crash them into buildings having significant economic and human impact.
    • In the London tube bombings they repeated a tactic already proven in Spain, to use relatively small amounts of common explosives to wreck mass transit facilities.
    • In other parts of the world (including a prior attempt on the WTC) they have used car and truck bombs made of kerosene and fertilizer to achieve frighteningly effective results.

    There is an awful lot of effort being expended protecting us from complex high-tech attacks, when the demonstrated pattern has been for Al Qaeda to use relatively low-tech methods and strike at targets that are easy to hit and achieve significant headlines. If we should learn anything from this, it is that Al Qaeda spends its terrorist money well, getting maximum effect for a minimum of resource.

    What we need is more thought and less hasty action, so that we too, might be capable of effective action in return. Pointless blustering actions like this, intended to reassure the public and sustain existing administrations' terms in office, do more to aide and abet the enemy than to frustrate them. We need reason and logic as our allies, instead of keeping them locked in the basement.

    Not to say that we shouldn't adopt reasonable means of securing high-impact targets, but we are ignoring medium and low-impact targets in favor of protecting the high-impact targets against exceedingly improbable attacks.

    And of course the Real Problem is that it is impossible to protect everything. We must work on improving our intelligence operations against them, and surgically taking out Al Qaeda FROM THE TOP DOWN, if we are ever to achieve any sort of victory over them.

    Why surgically? Because when you use a hammer to smite a fire ant, you wind up dealing with many more fire ants than you can handle. Flashy methods (e.g., large-scale military invasions) play right into the hands of Al Qaeda, becoming free recruiting tools and bringing millions of new budding terrorists into the fray.

    Use covert assassinations instead, and spend more effort on attacking them in this way than on elaborate schemes to defend that which cannot be defended against every possible attack.

    "When in Danger, or in Doubt, Run in Circles, Scream and Shout" -- Laurence J. Peter.

  • Other folks have already pointed out how little sense this makes (how many other ways can you get the same info? why draw so much attention to yourself?). The more I think about it, the more this seems like it has nothing to do with Google maps -- it's just a convenient way for this guy to force politicians to pony up for more security. He releases this thing, accuses Google, and people all over the world are talking about how undefended this reactor is. Who wants to bet that, within a week, the whole compl
  • Complaints like this should be more properly addressed by removing the offending images from the hosting site, not by asking Google to black them out. The images, of course, will still be visible to anyone who comes to the site by some route other than Google. It also reflect a basic misunderstanding of what Google is and how it works.

    However, why not alter the content of your site if it was accessed via Google, or any other search engine? Want some content to be seen only by people who actually come direct

  • just calls more notice. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kaenneth ( 82978 ) on Sunday August 07, 2005 @08:36PM (#13266224) Journal
    Someone on IRC noticed a blur on google maps, a single house in Florida.

    By tracing the map to figure out the city and street, and googling on that, I was able to figure that it was probably a Senatorial candidates house.

    I can't imagine why they would blur it out, it just induces curiosity, and I can't imagine what use anything they blurred out could have been, unless Bush's daughter was nude sunbathing at the time or something.

  • User-agent: Googlebot, Disallow! Hello?? (Score:3, Informative)

    by DavidD_CA ( 750156 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @02:15AM (#13267426) Homepage
    From http://www.google.com/remove.html [google.com]

    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: /

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