Hacker News Reader

Comment by noahl | Hacker News Reader

Hi! I enjoyed reading your comment, but please be careful before posting working explosive recipes on the internet nowadays. It's sad that we have to think about it, but we do.

(Unless you deliberately posted one that doesn't work, in which case, you got me :) )

View on HN

Potassium nitrate and sugar has been a very well known mixture for - what? Hundreds of years at least.

We need a culture of rational and critical thought, not one that sequesters away knowledge.

"Rocket candy" is very widely known already, and HN is probably the last place terrorists will look. And terrorists won't use rocket candy. Hey, did you know you can react nitric acid with glycerin to get nitroglycerin?

You can even react nitric acid with all sort of oily things such as benzene and toluene and get various explosive. Isn't that common knowledge? I remember being taught that in chemistry back in high school (nothing lights up interest of pupils in chemistry like things that go boom).

Right, because if we hide the information then bad people won't have access to it. One of the first uses of the public Internet was to distribute text files with bomb recipes. That and porn. Cat pictures came later.

The world's libraries and archive.org have already curated the classic texts on the production of explosives and fireworks, from benchtop scale all the way up to industrial. No casual internet commentator need fear that they're exposing dangerous secrets. It is all out in the open already.

The Chemistry Of Powder And Explosives by Tenney L. Davis

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.206012

Pyrotechnics by George Weingart

https://archive.org/details/Pyrotechnics_by_G._Weingart_2nd_...

Military and Civilian Pyrotechnics by Herbert Ellern

https://archive.org/details/Military_And_Civilian_Pyrotechni...

Chemistry and Technology of Explosives by Tadeusz Urbanski

Volume 1: https://archive.org/details/Chemistry_and_Technology_of_Expl...

Volume 2: https://archive.org/details/Chemistry_and_Technology_of_Expl...

Volume 3: https://archive.org/details/Chemistry_and_Technology_of_Expl...

Volume 4: https://archive.org/details/ChemistryAndTechnologyOfExplosiv...

I'm not going to link all 10 volumes of Fedoroff's Encyclopedia of Explosives and Related Items, but they're online too. They are sitting on the shelves of university libraries around the world and have been for decades. So are books about the production and use of chemical warfare agents! These books are also much higher quality than information circulating in text files or printed "cookbooks" selling the allure of forbidden knowledge.

Generally speaking, people don't abuse this knowledge to violent ends because

1) Most people never seriously intend to commit violence in the first place.

2) Of the few people with premeditated intent to commit violent crime, most will not or even can not manage to make effective poisons and explosives from accessible materials, even given a curated reading list of relevant books. Technical aptitude and diligent study do not intersect with violent criminality very often.

Ha ha, nice try. People in the UK get arrested for reading about those things. It does seem that those charged are usually guilty of some other crime, however.

https://www.google.com/search?q=anarchist+handbook+uk+arrest

I'm not sure what the actions of one particular repressive regime has to do with it?

it's probably alright as long as he doesn't tell ISIS the secret recipe for "red iodine" (aka "nuclear nitroglycerin")

I've heard 'red iodine' is a long running troll the intelligence community plays on terrorist groups. They say it works; extremists say it works & you can't fool them out of looking for it!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com