The Minecraft Code (2024) [video] | Hacker News Reader

The Minecraft Code (2024) [video]

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67 pointszichy68 comments

Internet denizens love opening a locked box. This phenomenon has been weaponized by the gaming industry in the form of loot boxes.

It is strange to me that people obsess on programming in-game with "red stone" etc. That said I am dayjob programmer so the last thing I want to do on my free time and is to program stuff.

I made a game that uses the Luanti "voxel" engine (MC-likes games of course, but also transposition of other genres), and even programming that is bit of a chore but that's the price to pay to play the game you want to play (there's much more to that than just programming/modding; game design is a rabbit hole).

But I think that it would be more rewarding for those who are curious about programming to start modding, especially in Luanti because it is relatively well documented and it's Lua. In a way, making it rain with the programmable particle spawner the engine provides is a loot box locked by an API, with hints on how to open it in the docs ;-)

https://i.redd.it/zj0csp06b4sd1.png

I think it is the fun of working towards simple goals, in a restricticed visual environment, in a gamified way. The challenge is the restriction. Starting with and and or gates while at work you would be writing CRUD

> game design is a rabbit hole

Game engine design is a rabbit hole :)

Game design is the ultimate lockbox - you're unlocking an entire imaginary world which has some platonic existance in your mind.

And since you mentioned Luanti, it deserves to be much better known as a credible open alternative to Minecraft. You could do a lot worse then designing/prototyping your game with Luanti as the game engine.

https://www.luanti.org/

Yeah i thought similar.

I like watching videos about these contraptions people build. Wouldn't dream of making on myself.

It's solved, full write-up here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MinecraftUnlimited/comments/1cvo5py...

Tl:dr; It was a release file for their Minecon event. It was never meant to be public. Obsessing over a password protected in a company's S3 bucket is weird and crosses many limits.

Telling people they should not try and crack something is kind of like the Streisand effect.

> Telling people they should not try and crack something is kind of like the Streisand effect.

More like a reverse-streisand effect. They were honest about the contents of the file, it was Minecraft 1.0 and not interesting, but the community didn't accept the explanation.

>is weird and crosses many limits.

It's similar in format to communities that obssess over "lost media." The inability to pirate or get access to something becomes an obsession. Even if the piece of media exists in an archive somewhere, that doesn't matter to them because it's about the fact that they themselves don't have access to it that has become the obsession.

There's also the piracy communities where a majority of users believe they have some sort of inherent right to watch something merely because it exists. I don't understand where that sentiment comes from.

> I don't understand where that sentiment comes from.

Human nature. Refusing to accept being told "no" by some greater force is the instinct that pushed humanity forward to where we are today.

That's a rather romantic way to say stubbornness is sometimes effective

I mean, part of the deal with IP law is you get government protection for your idea, in exchange for society having access to it.

I’m personally of the mind that if my tax dollars went towards protecting your shit, you owe society access.

This is not defending the ones who believe they have the right to things sans that deal

This argument is so ridiculous I must be misunderstanding you.

By your logic you owe me access your house since my tax dollars pay for the legal system that gives you property rights?!

It's not ridiculous, that's the deal (at least it was). It's not actual property. It's a made up concept, you actually lose nothing physical if it's copied. That concept was created and granted to encourage people to create.

You get a certain period to commercialize it, then it's public property. Hiding it away to prevent that is a breach of the spirit of the agreement society made with the creator.

That you believe it's a "ridiculous" argument shows how much you've been brainwashed by corporations.

All this stuff is generally built on the shoulders of previous works, that are public domain. Copying story structures, phrasing, etc. Even entire storylines.

And that's before we get onto the fact that all these corporations benefited from eveything we paid for. Laws to protect their IP, enforcement, infrastructure paid with by public money, education of workers, etc..

They've got their hands out to take, take, take, but when it comes to holding up to their part of the bargain, it's suddenly extensions on copyright terms, minor tweaks to "renew" IP that was never part of the original deal, etc. while feeding a ton of cash to politicians in what looks like a bribe, acts like a bribe, but is termed "lobbying".

>It's a made up concept

Physical property is made up too. You don't lose anything from someone sleeping on your couch either.

If someone is sleeping on your couch, then you lose the ability to sleep on it yourself, because they are taking up the space.

Well then they can sleep in your bed if you want the couch or someone else in your home you aren't using.

But then how do we determine who has priority for the couch? The singleton nature of the couch requires some form of access control to prevent disputes. No such restriction exists for a memory of the couch, once we have each been exposed to it we can enjoy the memory perpetually and simultaneously with no conflicts.

Artificially restricting what can be remembered and by whom solely on the basis that some forms of memory produce new physical artifacts ("copies") is absurd on its face.

That said, the ability to monetize a memory is much more like the couch. In theory this is the resource copyright aims to protect. In practice, experts disagree to what extent piracy impacts potential monetization leaving us with two sides of the debate tending to talk past eachother.

If someone else is sleeping on it, it’s not your couch until you remove them from it and occupy it yourself.

Unless we agree upon the abstract concept of “owning” property even while you do not physically possess it.

You need look no father than a kindergarten to see the natural way of things: the toy belongs to whichever toddler is holding it.

While not entirely comparable, it is no more absurd to extend the idea to intangible ideas as well.

The discussion was started on IP law, you have to agree on abstract concepts of ownership as a bedrock of the entire system since you can’t physically be in possession of an idea.

If you need to bring us down to kindergarten or toddler level for us to no longer need to come to an agreement on the definition of ownership, I’m not sure there’s much more to discuss

Yes, a simple lock (in the concurrent software sense) is one system that could work. Harking back to my own kindergarten experience, though, I am not sure if such a system is best for minimizing disputes.

Physical property rights are made up too. How can you claim to own something if you aren’t actively defending it nor physically possessing it in that moment.

Do you “own” your house even when you’re not home? Yes, you do, because we all agreed on this made up thing called “property rights” and we pay our tax dollars to have it enforced. Otherwise whoever is in your house “owns” it until you or someone else forcible removes them or convinces them to leave.

All our rules are “made up”.

Nuance beaten by a strawman. Well done.

You know what, your words are all made up.

The guy just laid out the beginning of Georgist philosophy. This is not a made up out of the air concept

Actually you do owe society your house. We settled on yearly property taxes to pay for what is owed to society for the protection of that property.

I am not aware of any type of IP enforced in the US that comes with a yearly taxed based on the value of the IP. If one exists, please let me know.

Assuming you're american: you already do.

While the US Army isn't allowed to use your house in peace time, if it has any tactical value in war time, it can and will have access to your house. The US Army is the personification of the tax dollars of GP, through the government.

Because of the US's relationship with personal property, it has been decided that only the worst case scenarios lead to these rights being "shared", but on less important subjects, especially ones that cost you nothing in the case of having a copy of your work made, yes. Things like the Audio Home Recording Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act) make it legal for me to make a copy of your work. What happens with this copy depends, maybe I'll share it with friends (and in this case, IP law will consider it minor enough that they won't care), maybe I'll resell it and make money from it (which IP law definitely considers a big no no).

You must be naive if you believe that you have any right to both benefit from public protection _and_ keep full control over how <thing> gets used.

Without IP law it is all or nothing: obfuscate, hide, encrypt, and protect lest it become public domain.

With IP law you are given the exclusive, enforceable right to control the distribution and sale of an idea for N years... at which point it becomes public domain.

In either case the decision to publish an idea will inevitably make it public domain. The government protects their shit because $REASONS but there is absolutely no obligation for it to be made public until that protection lapse. In matters of human culture this seems like a bug, not a feature but enforcing some standard of "reasonable worldwide availability" by force seems impossible. The invisible hand of piracy "solves" this oversight and functions like a safety valve.

Not an endorsement of either side, just an observation.

This was fine when N = 28. Now it's life of the author plus 95 so there is almost no possibility of anything released in your lifetime to be a part of the public domain before you die.

A british man predicted this was going to happen nearly two centuries ago. His address to the courts are worth reading in their entirety, it contains everything we need to know about copyright.

https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...

> At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. [...] Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end.

> Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly

> Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law

> Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit

> and the whole nation will be in the plot

> when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop

> The public seldom makes nice distinctions

> The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create

Wonderful reference, thank you! I'm tempted to return to my notes and write an essay on this.

If that were the case then no physical artwork could be privately held. That, too, is covered by IP laws but there is no obligation to provide society access.

Physical artwork is not covered by IP law. Reproductions of the artwork are covered by IP law. Physical property is already covered by regular property rights

> if my tax dollars went towards protecting your shit, you owe society access

Well, the protection is only from random people accessing one's stuff, so this is a very silly (in fact nonsensical) argument. "If my tax dollars went towards you having right X, I thus deserve to infringe on that right X".

> I’m personally of the mind that if my tax dollars went towards protecting your shit, you owe society access.

Our tax dollars go towards protecting lots of different things for lots of different people (including me and you) that we have no rights to at all, nor ever will.

And they are taxed in different ways to pay for it(property taxes) or I and society at large get some benefit(protecting utility companies property that I can’t access)

Intellectual properties are temporary. Patents and copyrights expire and enter the public domain.

The social contract is we all pretend we can't trivially copy their works for a couple decades so they can turn a profit and then the works enter the public domain.

The constant extensions of copyright duration clearly demonstrate that the copyright industry has no intention to fulfill their end of the deal. They have systematically robbed us of our public domain rights and become rent seekers.

That should be the default assumption. It's restrictions which require justification in a liberal society, not freedoms.

"Everyone has to share everything" is a restriction, not a freedom.

Where did that come from? 'You aren't allowed to prevent others from sharing this thing' is completely different from 'you have to share this thing'. 'Everyone is allowed to share everything' is a freedom, not a restriction.

Whether or not it's a freedom people should have is a difficult question to answer because we don't know what the modern world would be like without copyright (I expect creators would try and get paid for creating more works so it might look like how nowadays some shows end in cliffhangers to give the creators some leverage over the publishers to say 'look, people want to know what comes next, maybe you should let us do another season').

People have always been allowed to share their own things; what you're demanding is the sharing of other people's things. It's not piracy if the owner chooses to share.

People are not allowed to share the copies they possess. That's the restriction.

Freedoms are a balancing of rights between two or more parties, and are never absolute. Complicating the matter futher: it is very unlikely that all parties are going to agree what that balancing of rights looks like. For example, someone who shares knowledge (e.g. a teacher) is going to have a very different perspective on copyright law than a person who sells knowlege (e.g. a publisher).

Yeah yeah, but the one I replied to couldn't understand why people felt entitled to see something just because it exists.

I can totally understand that, it just means they don't buy the various excuses for why they shouldn't be allowed to. I wouldn't either, in most "lost media" cases.

> I don't understand where that sentiment comes from.

If you actually wish to understand, I can point to a thread where this was discussed somewhat at length by others and myself not too long ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44907830

TL;DR:

Public domain is the natural state of information. Intellectual property is an absurd state granted monopoly on what boils down to numbers. Copyright in particular is a functionally infinite monopoly that robs us of our public domain rights. Copyright infringement is civil disobedience of unjust laws and arguably a moral imperative. Copyright enforcement requires the destruction of computer freedom as we know it as well as everything the word "hacker" stands for and therefore it must be resisted even if it destroys the copyright industry. It makes zero economic sense to charge money for information which has infinite availability, therefore society must figure out how to pay creators before the work is produced.

Not only are you being disingenous by generalizing to "anything that exists" (when for the immense majority is "anything you put up for sale", it's just Mossad that wants your family vaction photos), but here's the thing: I do have that right. By default. It might make you unhappy, but I have it. It crosses into a different territory if I deprive you from it (theft), or if the only I would have had to acquired it would be to buy a copy from you(piracy), but ultimately, as a society, we've decided that harming you for it is a line not to be crossed.

I have every right to see a thing. Just like you have every right to try to stop me from doing so. The general rule is that we shouldn't hurt eachother trying to do it/prevent it.

Interest in lost media is a harmless hobby, which occasionally yields positive fruit. Reddit looked for the identity of the song "Subways of your Mind" for 17 years before it was found, and I'm sure the band was pleased to learn their music had found such interest so many years later. Where's the harm? Calling it "obsession" to make it sound bad can be done to any hobby.

I guess only boxpig41 knows what else was protected that caused them to replace the file just to avoid the chance that the real password might get out and those might be unlocked, though at this point I’m assuming those encrypted files are gone or are no longer important.

This is true.

I disagree with this and what Dinnerbone says about locks. It doesn’t matter who file was intended for, it’s on the internet, if people want to use their silicon to do some mathematics to turn some numbers into some other numbers that’s their choice. It’s not equivalent to breaking into a house.

I agree it's not the equivalent, but the file could've contained things like Minecon attendees. That would still mean it's badly secured of course, but putting a huge community effort behind it and youtubers making 'Biggest Secret in Minecraft' videos about it would suddenly turn into very bad taste.

I personally don't see downloadability as a significant factor in the morality of breaching security. If it's bad to hack a login screen to gain access to private information, why wouldn't it be bad to hack encryption to do the same thing? What moral dimension does downloadability alter?

I think the house analogy fails because you cannot duplicate a house, take it somewhere else, and attempt to break into it there. If you could, that would undoubtedly be seen as a violation.

so weird. many limits.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Thanks for posting that AACS key. It's been awhile since I've seen it running around the internet and we need more of that kind of thing, these days.

>He mentioned that he does not want people to nag him about it and that “It's brought up every single year, I'm hoping this is the last ”. Finally putting an end to a 13 year old mystery.

Ouch

Weird. The file was cracked in May 2024, while the password had appeared in a database leak which was added in HIBP (and thus pretty much public) back in October 2017.

Unsure why it took the community so long to crack the file.

The cracking basically started the moment youtubers presented it as 'a mystery'.

the salt for the passwords in the bitly breach isn't known, and the few plaintexts available were lost to time

It is rather common in gaming to communities to find people completely obessed over ultra specific details of their favorite game. It isn't even the first time for Minecraft, see the "pack.png" case.

I see you haven’t stumbled across the Minecraft community much, because this weirdness is just every day for them.

Take for example, the infamous 2B2T Minecraft server.

Exploits and game breaking mechanics by virtually impossible to discover bugs, and the no rule against hacking and cheating, have led to things people didn’t think were even possible in Minecraft over the servers ~15 year history.

Minecraft (java edition) has been decompiled, modded with different launchers and recompiled since ages. The reason you need a "launcher" is because for some reason Minecraft's jar file doesn't have a way of downloading all the assets Minecraft needs in order to run.

Maybe add to title: “but is solved now”. Would have saved me some time thinking they might go somewhere.

It was solved? They never decrypted the original file, only the decoy.

Ah, the video is a year old. There is another link to a reddit post in the thread. Supposedly it is solved now! Read more there

See comments below.

Both of them were eventually decrypted. The decoy was a misdirection attempt to get people to shut up about the whole thing, since the original contained a passphrase that had been reused multiple times for Mojang's internal operations. But it only caused more people to go digging as they noticed the hash changed, along with an employee acting highly defensive about it.

They used "boxpig41" for the original and "thespicemustflow" for the decoy. Both of them contain the jar and assets for Minecraft 1.0, but the original also contained an ordinary copy of the Minecraft launcher, so that the files could used to run it during a live event even if internet access goes down, hence the larger file size.

Hmm that was a tricky one. I, er, solved it by truncation - a surprisingly effective trick for titles.

Thanks for the heads-up!

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