Help Protect Australia From Text Files
If you live in Melbourne, chances are you've seen one of these Help Protect Australia From Terrorism posters. Probably at a train station. But look really closely...
I've blown up (heh) the relevant area of the poster, marked by the red arrow on the left. Forgive the shitty, grainy cellphone camera shot, but it actually shows more detail than the PDF you can get online:
I spotted it straight away: TOTSE.
Temple Of The Screaming Electron
Back in the day, TOTSE was a BBS that specialized in text files.
Some of these text files, like the page in the poster describe how to build bombs—pretty standard Terrorist's Handbook / Anarchist's Cookbook sort of fare—and could be used by angsty teenagers in the 1980s, by the mere act of being caught reading them, to terrorize school administrators and local police who didn't know what a computer (let alone a BBS) was at the time.
And some of the other files, like this extensive collection of erotic fiction could be used to, uh...
Anyway, I thought it was amusing to see this on an anti-terrorism poster. I also deeply appreciated the old-school BBS reference.
copyright © 2006, 2007 Emil Mikulic
Originally posted to hashpants on 2006-06-29 21:26:17 AEST.
Note: unlike putting a picture of a guy browsing TOTSE on a national
security poster, real Terrorism is neither funny nor cool.