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>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 serv
by 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 agoI'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.
- cycloptic 7y agoI still don't see how this is any different from placing text files on a server. To make it difficult for crawlers to find it, you can just put the files in a folder with a name that's hard to guess. Do you really think a bad actor can't deploy bots in minecraft? That doesn't seem to be a realistic expectation.
- pirocks 7y agoAfaik making a minecraft bot that can survive long term in a hostile minecraft world like 2b2t, unaided by a human and for extensive amounts of time is somewhere between very hard and an open problem in AI.
- cycloptic 7y agoYes, so is making a web crawler that can guess URLs of hidden documents. So what have we gained here? Are we really inviting activists to attempt to trade the problems of censorship for the problems of bad RNG and griefers?