While (thankfully) the odds of this happening to a websurfer are low, they are still (unfortunately) higher than they used to be. Apathy being one of the reasons why no one seems to really care anymore, I found it important to share this news story with you in the hopes that we all remember the truth behind the apathy: one person really can make a difference.

From the CBC: Montreal Student sounds alarms over planned UK school attack

Winnipeg native spots ominous message posted on web forum

Posted on Friday, March 20th 2009

A student at Montreal’s Concordia University says he was proud to play a role in helping to stop a school attack in the United Kingdom this week.

J.P. Neufeld, a 21-year-old Winnipeg native, alerted authorities on Tuesday after he stumbled across a posting on a web forum from a student claiming he was going to burn down his school in Norfolk, England.

“You don’t make threats like that idly. Either it was a hoax or something he was going to go through with,” Neufeld told CBC News.

Neufeld saw the threat when he was scrolling through a forum on the technology website newgrounds.com.

“I saw this thread started by this guy. It didn’t seem serious at first. It said that today at 11:30 a.m. GMT I will commit violence and other forms of arson against my school [in Norfolk]. He had posted a picture of a gas can,” Neufeld told CBC News.

He quickly looked up the phone number for police in the area and gave them a call via an internet telephone service.

“I said, ‘Hi, I’m a guy from Canada. There is someone about to set fire to a school.’ At that point I didn’t know the name of the school or the guy. I gave the police the address of the thread,” said Neufeld.

Eventually, police and other contributors to the web forum tracked down information about a suspect and narrowed down the school.

In less than an hour, police made an arrest.

Read the rest of the story here.