
Activists create a 12.5M block library in Minecraft to bypass censorship - vezycash
https://www.pulse.com.gh/bi/tech/activists-created-a-125-million-block-digital-library-in-minecraft-to-bypass/bn4gpcc
======
aquova
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.

~~~
ardy42
> 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?

~~~
chipperyman573
Yes
[https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Minecraft_China](https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Minecraft_China)

~~~
wcoenen
Can you elaborate? The page you link to, does not say anything about
censorship.

~~~
Karunamon
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.

~~~
stolen_biscuit
Is there any evidence of that in this case? None of the changes you have said
are shown in the link

~~~
judge2020
[https://dota2.gamepedia.com/Low_Violence](https://dota2.gamepedia.com/Low_Violence)

[https://old.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/49x7m0/chinese_wow_cen...](https://old.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/49x7m0/chinese_wow_censorship_comparisonlots_of/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_in_China#Content_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_in_China#Content_control_and_censorship)

~~~
stolen_biscuit
I'm not talking in general, I mean specifically for Minecraft

------
agumonkey
1) applause for idea and realization

2) slight scepticism, how is this information curated ? can someone infect the
pool by injecting bogus news ?

3) 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

~~~
Ghjklov
>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.

This library was created for a reason.

~~~
mrguyorama
Minecraft servers can prevent visitors from modifying anything.

------
bigdict
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.

~~~
gowld
Letting authoriries bann "bad" content makes it easier to ban you when they
decide you are bad.

~~~
bigdict
No one "let" them do it, they just did it, illegally.

------
qubex
Previous conversation:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22569178](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22569178)

------
Krasnol
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?

~~~
eloisius
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
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.

~~~
cycloptic
>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
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.

~~~
cycloptic
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.

~~~
pirocks
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.

~~~
cycloptic
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?

------
dorkwood
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?

~~~
pirocks
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.

~~~
lainga
Hasn't MCEdit not been updated since the Aqua update?

~~~
saddestcatever
Correct, MCEdit is an amazing tool, but hasn't worked for a few versions ever
since they updated the way in which blocks were stored....

------
lihaciudaniel
The minecraft server: visit.uncensoredlibrary.com

~~~
wutwutwutwut
Wonder how long this will be accessible from China.

~~~
judge2020
This was brought up last time, it most likely doesn't work for China
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22569524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22569524).

------
zem
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.

~~~
aquova
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).

~~~
dmix
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?

~~~
aquova
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).

------
badrabbit
Can they host it on ipfs,that can help with censorhsip a bit

~~~
duskwuff
No. IPFS cannot replace real-time network protocols like the Minecraft
client/server protocol.

------
catalogia
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.

------
dreary_dugong
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.

[https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Minecraft_China](https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Minecraft_China)

Earlier Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22569178](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22569178)

~~~
867-5309
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

------
saagarjha
How do you read the books? Or is this just a structure?

~~~
goda90
Minecraft has books that you can type into and read later.

~~~
DonHopkins
Unfortunately the font and the amount of text per page leaves something to be
desired.

------
warent
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.

~~~
LeoTinnitus
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.

~~~
DonHopkins
Exactly! Minecraft saves huge amounts of time pawing through legos to find
just the right block in just the right color, so it's a net win! ;)

Plus you can's accidentally step on Minecraft blocks in your bare feet.

------
liquidify
Isn't this the kind of thing that will inevitably cause Minecraft to get
banned in certain countries?

------
dang
It was posted a few days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22569178](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22569178)

------
anderspitman
Minecraft is essentially a coarse CAD tool with an approachable UX.

------
joejohnson
What’s in the US wing?

------
Melting_Harps
> Minecraft has books that you can type into and read later.

That's pretty amazing, its like a modern, digital version of The Library of
Alexandria.

~~~
jfkebwjsbx
I don't know, it was already in very old, popular massive-multiplayer games
like Ultima Online.

------
mikelyons
To join the minecraft server:

 _visit.uncensoredlibrary.com_

------
brian_herman
I thought they encoded actual banned books into the map. This is cool though
it looks really nice.

------
black_puppydog
Real men choose a random seed that already _contains_ the library!

------
smitty1e
Oh, I thought they were embedding stories in blocks.

~~~
DonHopkins
Books are just another kind of block, with some text data, so effectively they
are.

The architecture, the dome, the world map, and the flags, all made out of
regular colored blocks, speak louder than words.

------
TheDesolate0
and all this media attention is going to kill it.

~~~
jccooper
It's an awareness project, so I think it's really the opposite.

------
xhkkffbf
This is nice. The architecture is gorgeous.

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.

~~~
jrochkind1
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.

~~~
xhkkffbf
Oh no. Not everyone. He can't even get a publisher for his newest.

[https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/woody-allen-gets-
cance...](https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/woody-allen-gets-canceled-
again/)

~~~
_jal
He can publish on Minecraft.

~~~
HenryBemis
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.

