Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/1999/05/20/bomb_victims_lobby_isps/

Bomb victims lobby ISPs

They call for an end to access to bomb-making sites

By Tim Richardson

Posted in On-Prem, 20th May 1999 11:58 GMT

The victims of bombings made a passionate plea to Net companies yesterday to rid the Web of any information that would help anyone make a bomb. The appearance of David Kaczynski, the brother of convicted Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, Marsha knight, whose daughter died in the Oklahoma City explosion, and Unabomber bomb-blast victim Gary Wright coincided with yesterday's debate on the publication of bomb making material in the Senate. The bomb victims called upon AOL, Microsoft, Disney and Yahoo! to make every effort to purge the Web of anything that could help someone build a bomb. Under the voluntary code, they also want search engines to remove links to explosives sites, according to a Reuters report. But while the Net companies were sympathetic to the victims’ wishes and regularly take steps to remove any bomb-making content, some industry figures concede it would be a near impossible task to rid the Net of all this material. A spokeswoman for Disney's Go Network told said it already used automated filters to remove unsuitable material. "It's not 100 per cent foolproof at this point," she told Reuters. "There's an awful lot of sites out there. "The Net is still a relatively new medium. There's still a little bit of the wild, wild Web aspect of it," she said. ®