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So I've seen this popping up in the recent days and what I don't understand: what would stop restrictive governments to block access to Minecraft because of tha

So I've seen this popping up in the recent days and what I don't understand: what would stop restrictive governments to block access to Minecraft because of that? 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?

pm90 7y ago
The goal of censorship isn't to get 100% lock down on information; its to make it hard for most of the populace. So governments don't really give a fuck until this becomes very popular and a lot of their citizens start using it at which point they will clamp down hard on it.
eloisius 7y ago
You wouldn't even have to ban Minecraft, they can just DNS ban visit.uncensoredlibrary.com. I really don't understand the hype of this whole thing.
- kick 7y ago
  You can rehost it anywhere, so while it isn't a silver bullet of a solution, they thought it out more than you're making it out to be. "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/ 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.
  - im3w1l 7y ago
    I think the questions "what does minecraft add to the equation beyond hype" is legitimate, and deserves better than to be dismissed as ridiculous. 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.
  - jedieaston 7y ago
    There isn't any way to merge Minecraft maps, I don't believe, so if you want to get the other books without copying them over by hand, you'll have to overwrite the books that someone wrote on your copy.
    - beering 7y ago
      There exist tools to merge Minecraft maps. There's some trickiness around making sure entities get merged properly, but it's a somewhat common need to take a section out of one world and plop it into another world.
  - cycloptic 7y ago
    >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]. [0]: https://www.minetest.net/ https://www.minetest.net/
    - imtringued 7y ago
      I'd say obscurity is a core part behind the idea of using Minecraft for this. Unless someone builds a tool to search books in Minecraft worlds there is no way to automatically verify if the world contains government critical information. You'd have to go inside the virtual library and read every single book. Compared to that a wikipedia mirror would just be instantly blocked because a government crawler is searching for keywords and blocking DNS access to the crawled sites.
wutwutwutwut 7y ago
It will be blocked in China if enough people access it. Would probably take some guy 2 minutes to add the IP address to their blacklist.

pm90 7y ago

The goal of censorship isn't to get 100% lock down on information; its to make it hard for most of the populace. So governments don't really give a fuck until this becomes very popular and a lot of their citizens start using it at which point they will clamp down hard on it.

eloisius 7y ago

You wouldn't even have to ban Minecraft, they can just DNS ban visit.uncensoredlibrary.com. I really don't understand the hype of this whole thing.

kick 7y ago
You can rehost it anywhere, so while it isn't a silver bullet of a solution, they thought it out more than you're making it out to be. "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/ 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.
- im3w1l 7y ago
  I think the questions "what does minecraft add to the equation beyond hype" is legitimate, and deserves better than to be dismissed as ridiculous. 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.
- jedieaston 7y ago
  There isn't any way to merge Minecraft maps, I don't believe, so if you want to get the other books without copying them over by hand, you'll have to overwrite the books that someone wrote on your copy.
  - beering 7y ago
    There exist tools to merge Minecraft maps. There's some trickiness around making sure entities get merged properly, but it's a somewhat common need to take a section out of one world and plop it into another world.
- cycloptic 7y ago
  >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]. [0]: https://www.minetest.net/ https://www.minetest.net/
  - imtringued 7y ago
    I'd say obscurity is a core part behind the idea of using Minecraft for this. Unless someone builds a tool to search books in Minecraft worlds there is no way to automatically verify if the world contains government critical information. You'd have to go inside the virtual library and read every single book. Compared to that a wikipedia mirror would just be instantly blocked because a government crawler is searching for keywords and blocking DNS access to the crawled sites.

wutwutwutwut 7y ago

It will be blocked in China if enough people access it. Would probably take some guy 2 minutes to add the IP address to their blacklist.