Using minecraft to bypass government censorship

a day ago by A404 to c/privacy

FridaVanMercury 106 points a day ago

Cool idea but also really impractical? Stuff like Anna's archive seems more useful.

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DekSomBoon 79 points a day ago

I'm guessing the benefit of this is that it just looks like a normal minecraft server so it is harder to block, but yeah there are other more efficient ways to share files out there

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RickyRigatoni 34 points 21 hours ago

Anna's Archive is also a very easy target for government censorship because of its practicality.

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floofloof 14 points 21 hours ago

Distributed, self-repairing storage would seem to be the way to go. Anna's Archive is huge so practically it might be necessary to prioritize the most threatened books. And someone would need to pay for the storage, whether it's in data centres or in people's homes. I remember many years ago experimenting with Freenet and Tahoe-LAFS, but I don't know if anyone's using systems like this for books, or if they have the adoption they'd need to be really robust.

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RickyRigatoni 4 points 21 hours ago

Freenet looks cool. I think the closest we get to that right now that people actually use is soulseek i guess. Plenty of people on that with stuff.

God damn it freenet does the mortal sin of its official installation instructions telling you to curl straight into sh. No Friend I Do Not Trust You Like That.

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VaalaVasaVarde 48 points a day ago

Giving people a way out of truble by saying

I read banned books ... in Minecraft.

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cyberpunk007 34 points 18 hours ago

Wouldn't it be easier to put the books in a torrent?

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ParlimentOfDoom 15 points 16 hours ago

Easier, yes. Less obvious, no.

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cyberpunk007 4 points 16 hours ago

All it takes is 1 bad person to speak out on this Minecraft library and the whole thing comes crashing down. Not very resilient, or am I missing something

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SCmSTR 11 points 15 hours ago

It's years old now and there's like a factor of 1000 more banned books. The book banning, while real, was always virtue signaling. So they were likely not thorough because they didn't have to be. It's far more efficient and effective to spread your seeds far and wide, scream about it, and then continue to light everything on fire and change laws and promote people and fire people and support companies, and harass doctors, etc. It's political idealism culture cold war carpet bombing, and is extremely effective.

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Hello_there 29 points 20 hours ago

Reading using books in Minecraft seems terrible. There's like 20 words a page. All the flipping you need to do to be able to read 10 pages of a normal book

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Sv443 10 points 18 hours ago

Better than nothing I guess

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lka1988 7 points 16 hours ago

This is missing the point. For some, this is the only way that banned books can be read.

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cosmos8188 21 points 16 hours ago

All is fun until microsoft, like the bootlickers they are, add malicious code in their next version specifically deleting this world - possibly using hashes.

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atopi 14 points 14 hours ago

Minecraft already has a way to block servers, the community has already made a mod to bypass it

You can literally read the source code for minecraft (excluding comments)

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cosmos8188 2 points 10 hours ago

Sure, but this doesnt change the fact there's a corporation behind it.

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bold_atlas 7 points 10 hours ago

People made minecraft. People make everything. Corporations don't create. They steal.

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whyderrito 2 points 6 hours ago

hell yea

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atopi 6 points 10 hours ago

But it changes the fact that the server could just be blocked when microsoft feels like it

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Blue_Morpho 21 points a day ago

Fun but pointless. A server is a server and can be blocked like any other. It would have been more user friendly and efficient to put the books on a webserver running on a non standard port. It could even be port 25565 (Minecraft's default).

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BooBees 53 points a day ago

It’s not pointless, it’s marketing, to bring attention to the efforts to preserve and distribute banned books. I wish more people understood this and used intelligent craft to fight against tyrannical oppressors. You bring attention in fun novel ways and that gets people who are interested in say Minecraft, a younger leaning demographic, to the fight.

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D06M4 2 points a day ago

Owned and managed by Microsoft, one of the biggest tyrannical oppressors.

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BooBees 14 points 20 hours ago

Yes, you recruit from pools that aren’t already members, right? You wouldn’t go to a labor union picnic to recruit new members for unionization, you’d go to the workers in the warehouse that are currently laboring in the problematic environment. Right?

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D06M4 -4 points 18 hours ago

Blue_Morpho had a point. What you're suggesting is more akin to creating a Twitter account to promote the Fediverse. I understand the logic you're trying to defend and I really wish it worked, but when it does it's usually shortlived as happens with many GitHub repos, even if some people fortunately reupload these elsewhere.
Going back to Minecraft, this would bring more people to purchase Minecraft than Minecraft players to reading books. It's not the right demographic, it's not even the right medium for reading comfortably, and it would fare better on Nomad Network pages, self hosted blogs and encrypted social media / instant messaging groups.

But yeah, all in all, sharing books through Minecraft is a funny idea for a funny anecdote.

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yucandu 1 point 20 hours ago

They do understand it, they're trying to stop it because they work for those tyrannical oppressors.

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cyberpunk007 2 points 18 hours ago

Non standard ports have been incredibly ineffective as a security measure for a long time.

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chicken 12 points 14 hours ago

This is why things like EU kids act are targeting videogames

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01189998819991197253 6 points 18 hours ago

Cool idea, but now all they have to do is get Minecraft, a nondistributed and nondecentralized product, to delete one thing. They're Swedish, so good luck with that, but the threat is still there.

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OldChicoAle 5 points 20 hours ago

All my homies hate governments

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Malica 4 points 8 hours ago

It's painful to see how good humanity can be in the face of how evil some of them are

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python 3 points 5 hours ago

I'm way more interested in finding out how they calculated where which book should go to avoid chunk-banning. Or maybe the server has a plugin running to allow more metadata than usual?

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Zephorah 2 points 21 hours ago

This is beautiful.

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geneva_convenience 2 points 8 hours ago

Wow can you read Normal People by Salley Rooney there?

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Sxan 1 point 17 hours ago

Didn't þis happen a couple of years ago?

Jesus, 6 years ago.

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wolframhydroxide 1 point 10 hours ago

It absolutely did. However, the fact that many people clearly haven't heard of it until now, and that many are being reminded of its existence and raison d'être, is sufficient justification to make this a worthwhile post.

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