- Commissioner Pravin Lal, Datalinks
Alpha Centauri pertinent as ever.
"This is how democracy dies, with thunderous applause." feels more grounded in reality.
Then the counter movement happened. And let's just say by 2016 social media was firmly under control and became a force against the people
We have an abundance of allowed information today, there is more restriction than ever of the distribution of information. Social media censoring, takedown requests, shadow banning, government censoring.
“Fighting disinformation” is the banner under which free flow is necessarily interrupted.
Peak of complexity and maturism in games...
Sister Miriam Godwinson, We Must Dissent
This game and its ideas are so timeless.
Best 4x game of all time. The 2060 that game envisioned seems closer everyday.
- Bad'l Ron, Wakener, Morgan Polysoft
Some of us remember when they assured us that the novel virus in china was not to be afraid of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
> The arguments for and against freedom of speech
It’s not about freedom of speech but about access to information.
What’s really being debated is whether a particular school library, children’s section, or curriculum should include a book. That’s not the same thing as government censorship. Schools and libraries make age-appropriate selection decisions all the time. They don’t carry every book ever published, and not every objectionable book belongs in front of kids just because someone wants to call its removal a “ban.” A single school library deciding not to carry a book because they think it's inappropriate, but that same book being available at the local public library, every book store in town, the internet, etc is not the same as the soviet union literally banning the ownership of books.
except for the cases where the government, not the librarian, is saying "you cannot have that book on your shelf, even if you think it is appropriate and want it".
>Nobody is being arrested for owning it, Amazon isn’t forbidden from selling it, and adults can still read it whenever they want.
when tomhow/dang "ban" someone from HN, that user doesn't get arrested if they make a new account. they can still visit the site. is it misleading for them to use the word "ban"?
In many cases these books are not simply being removed at the school level but are being driven by the government and it is politically motivated.
Ignoring the problem won’t lead to them being banned in the sense that having them would be illegal, but it could make it more difficult to get. It would not be hard to imagine states like Florida going further and attacking public libraries or possibly even making it so you have to show an ID to buy these books.
Some public libraries are already being attacked.
“Banned” may not be technically correct but it also properly communicates the seriousness of this and the goals of the people pushing this.
As far as I can tell the standard for a book being "banned" is just that the librarian or the bookseller is sympathetic to the book's message and thinks it should be more widely read while politicians or parents might think it's inappropriate or they disagree with the message.
If you put the shoe on the other foot and name a book that's out of print because publishers dislike the material or it's problematic in the eyes of librarians, I don't think it fits the standard. Birth of a Nation for example is not a "banned movie" and neither is Song of the South. So the standard is entirely set by teachers, librarians and booksellers.
These are non-sexually-obscene informational speech yet the librarians and teachers don't actually want you looking at these banned media because they could actually be used to challenge the established order and system rather than just shuffling who is in power to possibly the guy the librarian likes.
But a library acting like they are doing some brave act of resistance by putting out a stack of books that are widely available, have always been widely available, and will always be, and saying they are "banned books, this is banned books week, look at all the books that have been banned!" when really they are books that a school board in wisconsin said shouldn't be in an elementary school library because the sex scenes are not appropriate for 7 year olds seems really silly to me.
I understand the point you are trying to make and you have good evidence backing your statement ("alcohol is banned the stadium", etc) but when it comes to books, when people hear ban, they think Fahrenheit 451 or The Khmer Rouge burning books. So I also understand the OPs point.
Unless you're an alcoholic, banning alcohol in schools or stadiums isn't quite the hardship of arresting people for owning To Kill A Mockingbird.
Its connotation has changed in the same way that people calling others "Nazis" and "Fascists" has changed with the constant misuse of them.
If you're that bad with semantics, I'd recommend the next book you check out is the dictionary.
It also makes it possible to provide free access to books that libraries decide against.
A project hosted on a public git repo cannot break the law, however adding whatever books you think are required looks easy. The instructions say:
> First, you'll want to put the ebook files in the /library/data/html/books directory.
They're usually school libraries that are removing books from their collection that contain explicit material, usually at the request of parents.
Unless I missed something I only spotted two book examples since that wasn't the focus of the article.
The book Nineteen Eighty-four contains sexual content. An authoritarian interested in reducing access to such literature about totalitarianism simply needs to get some parents worked up over sex.
If it was just explicit material then the bible would also need to be banned. But as always, it was never about protecting the children.
When I was growing up in the early 90s, a local crazy preacher guy got a bunch of people riled up and angry about Goosebumps, Huckleberry Finn and to Kill a Mockingbird. These were the same types of folks playing metal music backwards to find satanic instructions.
It was a simpler time without the internet to keep stupid people riled up for extended periods. Now idiocy is a social movement.
But on a fun sidenote: When Life of Brian was initially banned in Norway, its distributor in Sweden started marketing it as "a movie so funny it's banned in Norway" :-)
> They're usually school libraries that are removing books from their collection that contain explicit material, usually at the request of parents.
So they were banned from certain school libraries then. Something doesn't have to be banned globally to count as being banned.
I’ll grant that some of the restrictions seem overprotective. That being said, a parent could easily check out one of those books for their child.
When people say "banned book" they mean that a certain level of government such as a school board or municipality has "banned" them from being in a public (often school) library.
But the headline "In [state I disagree with] they are banning books that have [ideas I agree with]" makes a lot more headlines and clicks.
Then people run with the phrase "banned books" to make things sound worse than they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_Sta...
USA is ultra conservative on the average in comparison to just any European state for example.
The evidence is that they don't serve it for school lunches.
Is that a weird argument? That's the same way people argue that books are "banned" in America.
Purely obscene material is also not protected by the 1st, but since the 1970s, the bar for that has been placed very, very high.
The closest I can think of offhand is that for about a year during the pandemic, Twitter suppressed gratuitous COVID misinformation posts, at the request of the government.
Very cool project nonetheless!
The majority of "banned books" are books that a random school district/religious school in a conservative part of the country elected not to include in their library at some point. Many of them are required reading in many other school districts and some of the most well known books of the 20th century.
The closer-to-banned ones are generally not included on banned-book-reading-lists and are banned on major retail platforms and long out of print and tend to be racist and/or genuinely subversive to liberal democratic principles. Most of these tend to be some of the most-downloaded-books-on-the-internet, and are also in no way illegal to own in the US - though possession of many is illegal in much of the EU.
An interesting case is United States vs Progressive inc [0] in which the US dropped a lawsuit to prevent a magazine from publishing a how-to guide on building an H bomb and Defense Distributed vs United States Department of State [1] in which the US federal government settled and allowed for the publishing of 3d printed gun files online, previously prevented under arms exports claims.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Progressive,_.... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Distributed_v._United_...
Having been in prison, I can tell you that being a Blood and having "certain books" in your locker is a "smash on sight" offense. The same could be said for the Aryan Brotherhood/Circle, and I'm sure for many other gangs.
There's a difference between "this one small group: local oklahoma school district/aryan brotherhood/catholic church" decided they don't like a book and the government level you will be imprisoned for owning/sharing this book.
If it's a 'banned' book library, why doesn't it include books banned by a variety of sources? To me, a 'banned' book library would included many thousands of books each tagged by which groups are banning them. That way, were I inclined to do so, I could read texts that were banned by both Jews and Christians, or by both democratic nations and totalitarian regimes, or whatever it was that I was interested in.
This particular compilation is a perfect example. Calling The Call of the Wild, a book that's been made in to several movies (the most recent of which grossing $111.1 million against a production budget of $125–150 million) a "banned book" is kind of ludicrous, no? Clearly many thousands or millions of people have access to it and it's contents, so it is clearly not 'banned' in any meaningful sense of the term, unless you happen to live in some region in which it is banned, but that enforces my claim that any such random small list doesn't really live up to the label.
The thing is that every other country does have what they're describing.
> The Color Purple has been challenged many times in order to be removed from public library circulation and public school curriculums.
And yet nobody challenged it to get it removed from US Amazon. Amazon _is_ forbidden from selling certain books in other countries. It's so not the same thing
However I haven't actually played with this and don't know if that would work, or if the network would require DNS to function properly.
"Since the device is a light bulb, it would be difficult to detect and likely to go unnoticed."
I doubt it would be any harder to shut down than any other public-access WiFi device, just a bit of experimentation with turning off power / devices would find it.
Modern enterprise access points even have built-in functionality to physically locate devices, and automatic warnings for rogue access points. The latter is often ignored or disabled though, because it'll go off every time someone prints or screen casts over Wi-Fi Direct.
If you went the other direction and didn't worry about it being noticeable, it would be kind of a fun project to break up a book into a series of QR codes. A scavenger hunt, with each code's text ending with a clue of where to find the next?
Now where the USA censors routinely is financial censorship. If you can afford the thing thats fincially banned, the sure, its not banned. But if you cant afford it, youre screwed.
And, if you work for a company, they can fire you for any/no reason, INCLUDING your speech off work.
In the USA, its "freedom of speech" if youre independently wealthy. If not, hope you dont offend power.
The book that is commonly at the number one spot on "banned book" lists has what would always be called hardcore pornography in the middle of the book. It depicts fellatio literally (not just implying it). It has no educational value, and is meant, within its context, to be erotic/lewd. I can link directly to it on archive.org, I can link to that exact page even. I do that sometimes in these arguments, and I'm downvoted until my comment is hidden but not before a bunch of jackasses say "and what does it matter"...
Sorry, don't want my 10 yr old looking at it in the school library. No, take that back... I'm not sorry. And you're all awful people for wanting that in the school library. Or dumb for not realizing that it's in the book. What I've come to realize as I've gotten older, is that some people think they have a right to show smut to my young children behind my back and want to call me a Nazi if I object.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_for_Alaska#Author's_re...
(I've not read it, of course, and don't know whether I'd consider it inappropriate for school libraries. However, it sounds like it was not intended as pornography and therefore isn't pornography according to some narrow definitions of that term. In any case, school libraries have such tiny budgets and there are so many uncontroversial good books in the world I can see why they might want to give this one a miss.)
Its easy to say that pornography and smut are the only things banned in school and public libraries, as your claim. But thats easily demonstrably false.
One only need to look at the American Library Association's banned list
https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10
What do we see? Descriptions of sexual acts? Well, some. But we also see horrific accounts of sexual slavery, high schooler life troubles including suicide, a comic called 'Gender Queer', depictions of magic (read: non-abrahamic occult practices).
In general, anything that doesnt fit the puritanical hard right wing christian gets threatened with bans, with great scruitiny on LGBTQ, sexuality, mysticism, suicide, and real troubles of young adults in high school.
But its completely disingenuous to says 'oh its just smut'. No. Its censorship for people who cant vote, and have no power. And the censorship is done by adults who want to pretend that not having a LGBTQ book will make young adults 'not gay' or some bullshit.
> What I've come to realize as I've gotten older, is that some people think they have a right to show smut to my young children behind my back and want to call me a Nazi if I object.
'Young children' are like 5 or 6. And no, its not a "right to show smut". Its having these books on the shelf in a age-appropriate way. These christian nationalist types are targeting anything related to anti-christian sentiments, DEI, LGBTQ themes of any sort, and whatever else falls in the sights of these worse-than-nazi folks.
Even a picture book that says a friend has 2 dads (and elementary way to relate) is banned. And those are real situations children will deal with, book or no. Im not saying to an 8 year old to read "The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty", either. But if they look up basic LGBTQ books cause they feel different, yeah, they should be able to.
Also, I think it would behoove you to learn your history, especially with the original nazies. One of the first libraries they dismantled and burnt was the https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen... or a university for sex medical studies. Some of the first trans research was done there. And anyone who wants to destroy knowledge is an enemy of me.
I would put Kevin MacDonald's antisemitic trilogy The Culture of Critique, the Turner Diaries ( which calls for mass extermination of non-white groups in the USA ) and Mein Kampf in the realm of books that should be shunned.
"Mein Kampf" is a good example of well written propaganda.
Like any good propaganda, it starts from true facts, so the first part of the book describes real problems of the society at that time (most of which are again problems of the present society).
The real problems would capture the attention of the readers, who were heavily affected by them in their own real lives.
Also like any good propaganda, from the true premises the book transitions to conclusions that do not result from the premises, but are falsely claimed to do so, and then solutions to the false conclusions are presented as if they will solve the problem described by the true premises (i.e. life is bad => the reason why it is bad is because there exist Jews => eliminate them and life will become good).
The same propaganda scheme from "Mein Kampf" is frequently applied today, but usually the Jews are replaced by China or by legal immigrants or by illegal immigrants or by people supporting another political party, always failing to identify the real culprits for the "life is bad" premises.
I do not agree that any propaganda books must be banned based on the condescending idea that humans are stupid, but I believe that it should be mandatory that any propaganda book should be accompanied by a well-written rebuttal, which should explain where the book in lying and why its conclusions are wrong, for the benefit of those less experienced, who might not notice these facts themselves.
I understand your discomfort with these books, and I actually agree that they deserve to be banned, but banning is not what we should do.
Its ultra important for historical/social and linguistic education.
I read it when I was 14, and I'm from Poland.
It is AWFUL and PAINFUL to read due to the horrible styling - which amuses me to this day. :) That's why no need to ban it hehehe
Nowadays books are for intellectuals, not for the masses... That's why I would be ok for any modern teenager to read anything 18+ or anti-whatever books :) It's net positive no matter of content IMO.
I guess when it comes to Freedom of Speech, you fall into the latter category.
For the curious, the "banned" books are (it's a short list):
- Call of the Wild - Jack London
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
- Women in Love - D.H. Lawrence
These are just public domain books provided as examples. You can put whatever you want on it.
Although, I dread to think what sort of files one would get when user uploads are allowed.
I guess the key is to disguise it further by making it entirely like normal. I’d perhaps give the SSID two passwords. One which is the normal configuration password and the other enables the port for your connection.
LoRa is also sub-optimal for payloads more than a few K in size and most ePub files are at least a meg...
Take a look at HaLow if you insist, but in general if a bulb has esp32 then you could likely replace the module for one with LoRA capabilities.
I can't wait until it's formalized enough that I can just buy a $20 light bulb, update it wirelessly somehow, and then have my own little "light bulb library" server.
1: > I was talking with a friend about this idea and the storage limitation and he thought it would be cool to have these devices form a mesh network
2: https://meshtastic.org/docs/community/enclosures/rak/harbor-...
Reads like you had fun, keep up the hacking!
P.S main -> mail I think?
As far as I can tell, RNS is a networking protocol that attempts to provide a mesh network that can run over almost any bidirectional connection (and interconnect different types of connections) without centralisation (basically random addresses using encryption, and announces to make that address reachable).
It's kinda similar to Meshtastic and Meshcore but designed to be more generic for any connection. Compared to Meshcore it's less bandwidth efficient since it uses larger addresses but I like RNS more because it's more generic (it's intended to be fairly bandwidth efficient but at a larger more internet level scale than just kilobytes per second) and less proprietary than the Meshcore official ecosystem. Compared to Meshtastic, RNS is much more efficient since it doesn't use flood routing for every packet.
And it's even better that it's for a good cause as well.
A lzs decompressor is pretty simple ..
advice for the op: the images in the page took half a minute to load (on multigigabit internet not being stressed). might be a routing issue between the server and my isp, but the images could use some optimization.