I went and looked around on the Minecraft map for a while. As a censorship bypassing tool, I think it leaves a little to be desired. The library has a main atrium discussing censorship levels in each country and how freedoms are being curtailed in each. There are also 6 halls (one for Vietnam, Russia, Egypt, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia, as well as one for the Uncensored Library) that actually contain censored documents in those countries, but each only had two or three, both in their native language and in English. There really wasn't much content.
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.
> There are also 6 halls (one for Vietnam, Russia, Egypt, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia, as well as one for the Uncensored Library) that actually contain censored documents in those countries
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?
Anytime a game from another country has a Chinese version, you can generally expect changes to include content censorship (blood and skeletons are common), isolated servers run by a Chinese company (NetEase in this case), and so forth.
Any Chinese game is de-facto censored compared to the versions released outside of the country.
As it was explained to me in my dealings with running infra in China: if you don't want your gaming site to be blocked you are encouraged to host inside China. When you apply for your ICP license and call out that you are gaming that's when they ask more questions about the type of content, access to in game chat logs, access to user source ip logs and any sort of transactions that could be seen as money transfer.
No. No it is not. Impactful and helpful, in the context of censorship, means that it causes censorship to not work. Eg by giving victims access to copies of the censored works.
>2) slight scepticism, how is this information curated ? can someone infect the pool by injecting bogus news ?
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.
> 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
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.
As a Russian, it’s puzzling to me that grani.ru was thought to be worthy of commemoration. The website is a hysterical tabloid offering predictable, biased hot takes on Russian politics. Its only questionable merit is that it was illegally blocked by the authorities.
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?
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:
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.
>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].
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.
I 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.
Afaik 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.
Yes, 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?
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.
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.
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.
Can someone who is more familiar with Minecraft explain how the physical structure of something like this gets built? Is it by placing blocks one by one, or using some third-party program and then importing it into the game?
It depends. In most cases it's definitely one by one, but external tools do exist. Tools like World Painter, MCedit, and the server side mod World Edit especially are used in large scale projects.
Mcedit is a popular program for large scale building. Additionally a lot of players use various mods which provide things like mirrored modes(so if your structure has symmetry you do an order of magnitude less work). A lot of massive structures are built by hand though. It's not as bad as it looks to build something massive by hand if you have a lot of detail in what you are building(the best builds always have lots of detail). Stuff like westeroscraft is mostly built by hand with some mods.
The "Making of" video on https://uncensoredlibrary.com is extremely light on details, but you can see the player placing entire columns with a single click at one point.
Thank you, this is the first time I've seen anybody mention the specific server. The article oddly avoids specifying the Minecraft server, instead linking to the offsite map.
people who play minecraft, how do you actually add a document to a map? and how do players read it? i.e. what is the physical experience of doing this, from both the upload and the reading end.
You can create paper, books, and signposts with the crafting table.
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.
There are books that can be placed on pedestals and read. Unless something has changed, the upload still requires manual entry, and according to the Minecraft wiki, you are limited to 12,800 characters (still quite a lot). As for reading, everyone is reading the same "page" at a time, so if someone turns the page, everyone is forced to change the page (pages being about 300 characters).
That sounds like a less than ideal UI, to put it politely. It obviously wasn’t designed for this sort of thing so I’m not pointing at Minecraft or expect them to support downloading random ebooks in a game interface.
I’m also guessing this is hosted on a 3rd party server? Could the hosts be individually blocked?
It's not ideal. I looked around on this server a few days ago, and almost always had to share a book with someone else who was flipping through pages. The server was limited to 100 users at a time, so it wasn't chaos, but I do think downloading the map and reading the documents offline is definitely ideal if you're just there for the content (although it does lose some of the appeal of being a "library" this way).
In addition to what the other posters said, there are mods that let you place images (so you could place an image of NYT) or even fully programmable computers (so you could just run $ cat on a file that contains a news article, or even request it from the internet - using the MC server as a proxy).
I find this library rather hard to navigate. The in-game space the minecraft library building occupies is enormous, larger than some real life cities I think. The mods are teleporting people around the map on request, but I think there are ways to automate that.
It's important to note that this will not easily benefit the people of China. China has its own edition of Minecraft which is not compatible with servers running the mainstream edition.
I think the only reason the Chinese edition exists is because most Chinese people aren't bothered by censorship. the main reason they might want to tunnel outside the Great Firewall is if they are bothered by censorship. any Chinese person who can read English and use a VPN is "free" to download and use the official Minecraft. but doing so labels them an activist, spy, traitor, etc. it's like trying to play games on a school computer, if there's a will there's a way. I appreciate the effort but if you want to learn anonymously, it would be much easier to use Tor and Wikipedia
Not to be "that guy" but I've always felt like Minecraft is largely a waste of creative energy and time that could be spent toward more tangible artistic creations like music or real life sculpting. Anyway, the point here being that I'm really blown away by this project and it has definitely given me a completely new way of looking at Minecraft to revise my old opinions.
It's really just modern day Legos. Personally I hate when people say time could've been better spent elsewhere. Universally people agree, however universally people equally would rather have fun than work.
I'm glad you're open to changing your mind. I'm no artist myself, but Minecraft definitely lets me express some of my creative aspect that capitalism reprehends.
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.
I think you're drawing a pretty bizarre comparison here. Murray's work is still available on Amazon, as well as in most other book stores and libraries. Woody Allen has previously written books that are still available on Amazon, and he recently wrote another book, but does not have a publisher and isn't willing to self-publish, which still puts him ahead of roughly 90% of writers. Harvey Weinstein is a film producer who was recently convicted of multiple counts of rape, not a writer at all.
I don't think it's a bizarre comparison at all. Many of the censored books are only censored in a few countries. They meet your criterion of being available on Amazon. So why are they special but the books disliked in America aren't? And heck, the "self-publish" idea could apply to all of the books in this library. They could also be tossed aside and told to "self-publish."
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.
You asked whether they should upload books by a rapist who hasn't written any books. I really disagree that this is a major quandry these people are going to have to face. Assuming your comment wasn't just an attempt to shoehorn in some barely related grievance about "cancel culture," it is very unclear exactly what comparison you were trying to draw between a rapist and a journalist who's been censored for telling the truth about an autocratic regime.
The fact that publishers have declined to publish an author's work does not mean that the author is being "censored". Publishers turn down books all the time. Many well-known authors have stories about how a book of theirs was rejected by many publishers before being accepted -- or before they got the message and wrote something more worthy of publication.
This is because censorship is when you can't get a text by government fiat, because providing it is illegal.
"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.
I don't know what those people have written, but I agree. It's important to save the work of authors we disagree with, just as much the work of authors we approve of.
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."
I believe they are all still easily readable both on the internet and at physical libraries, no? My local library has many copies of every Woody Allen book, for instance.
He could easily self publish. It's not like the government is forbidding him from writing; it's that other people don't want to be associated with it.
That's not censorship.
You're confusing the freedom of association with censorship. If nobody wants to publish him, it's either an ethical decision of people who don't want to associate with known rapists, or a business decision of people who don't think his works will sell well.
Although I am in favour of them printing what they want, let's keep their poison away from children, unless Minecraft has age restrictions in their library.
I don't know why they downvote you. The best think Hitler ever did is kill himself, but still, the poison he has put on paper must live on so we never forget what happened. We do have the risk that some people may follow those writings, but we should not erase history.
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).
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.