Activists create a 12.5M block library in Minecraft to bypass censorship
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Instead, the library serves more like a digital art exhibit, showcasing some of the struggles around the world. The architecture is really something, I would almost argue it's too grandiose, the main atrium is too large for the game to render at once, even on the furthest render settings, unless you actually stop to let it all pop in for about a minute.
I was impressed by it, and if they continue to add additional documents I think it would really be impactful and useful.
I'm surprised by the omission of China, because it's probably the poster child for modern day political censorship. Is Minecraft censored there or something?
Any Chinese game is de-facto censored compared to the versions released outside of the country.
2) slight scepticism, how is this information curated ? can someone infect the pool by injecting bogus news ?
3) the idea of video game players crawling through virtual worlds to acquire real knowledge.. is the most poetic idea in game I heard in 10 years
I think your skepticism is genuine but it just makes me think about how long it will be until this library get's banned, cancelled, and censored because they found some small percentage of fake information that could've been planted by literally anyone for fun or by state actors who have the incentive.
This library was created for a reason.
Poetic, sure. There’s also the way more mundane yet infinitely more effective method of just using a goddamn VPN, which gives you access to the whole internet instead of a random collection curated by activists.
The architecture is amazing, though.
I mean, surely those semi restrictive governments won't do it but in those countries you can probably get those books elsewhere but in societies like China, Russia or Iran expanding the wall to Minecraft shouldn't be a problem.
Wouldn't that alienate the audience to the material because of that in the end?
"I hear you're doing X! Have you considered [basic and trivial thing to consider that took me five seconds to think of]? Ha! Try again next time!"
It's such a ridiculous thing to me when people do this on the internet. People put thousands of hours of effort into this; do you really think they wouldn't have thought of such a basic thing?
It even says in the original link, but it's not like anyone who said the same thing in that thread had looked at the link, either:
https://uncensoredlibrary.com/
The entire point is that individual game maps are incredibly difficult to censor, especially when they're maps for the most popular game in the world; one server gets blocked, two more get thrown up.
I don't see how that's any different than putting text files in a git repository which can then be cloned and hosted anywhere. In some ways, it's worse, because it depends on Minecraft which is a closed source product owned by Microsoft, and its map format is proprietary. Is this format done simply because it appeals to young activists? Or is it because the appearance of playing a game gives better cover to journalists? Both those could be good reasons, but they are notably not technical reasons and would not make the maps more difficult to censor. In any case it would seem a little less suspect if these were instead importable into a FOSS replacement like Minetest [0].
Do you really think a bad actor can't deploy bots in minecraft? That doesn't seem to be a realistic expectation.
The only benefit I can think of is that if Russia has a system that automatically blocks websites based on content, it wouldn't work with minecraft.
https://www.worldpainter.net/ https://www.mcedit.net/ https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/worldedit
Books contain text that can be viewed and edited.
Edit: FWIW, MC books display a tiny amount of text at a time, and it's pretty laborious to read even a couple sentences. This really isn't an effort to provide access to censored content as much as it is a beautiful MC build.
I’m also guessing this is hosted on a 3rd party server? Could the hosts be individually blocked?
https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Minecraft_China
Earlier Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22569178
Plus you can's accidentally step on Minecraft blocks in your bare feet.
That's pretty amazing, its like a modern, digital version of The Library of Alexandria.
visit.uncensoredlibrary.com
The architecture, the dome, the world map, and the flags, all made out of regular colored blocks, speak louder than words.
Has anyone talked about adding the US authors who are being canceled? Like Charles Murray? Woody Allen? Harvey Weinstein (if he ever writes anything)? All headed for the memory hole.
This is a question the library is going to face. I'm just asking the question. And heck, I didn't choose the most controversial people out there for examples, but I'm getting downvoted like crazy. The hairsplitters will blather on about how only governments can censor, but the downvoting going on here sure feels like censorship to me.
"Canceling" is a worrying trend, I agree with you on that. The people you're talking about are not experiencing censorship in America, making your proposal irrelevant in context.
If you had proposed, say, hosting Milo Yiannopoulos' tweets, that would have almost made sense. It's still not state censorship, but they're no longer broadly available, whereas Murray's books clearly are.
Almost. There's still a huge gulf here, because if you put Milo's tweets up on a web server (almost certainly someone has), no American need fear loss of access to that site.
Otherwise we are just as guilty of censorship. And recall, a moral justification for censorship is still censorship. I'm reminded of the apocryphal quote of Voltaire, "I may not agree with what you say, but I with defend to the death your right to say it."
Hell, the ones who aren't in prison mostly seem to be getting their careers back.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/woody-allen-gets-cance...
From Wikipedia: Thucydides has been dubbed the father of "scientific history" by those who accept his claims to have applied strict standards of impartiality and evidence-gathering and analysis of cause and effect, without reference to intervention by the deities, as outlined in his introduction to his work.
I do NOT imply that Allen, Weinstein, Hitler are the modern Thucydides buy if we silence them we become them. Let their works be forgotten because they deserve it, not because they were censored (imho).