Banned Book Library in a Wi-Fi Smart Light Bulb(richardosgood.com) |
Banned Book Library in a Wi-Fi Smart Light Bulb(richardosgood.com) |
What follows is not a critique of the author, for he or she is likely immersed in the same "banned books" media psyop as other Western News Consoomers.
As of this reply, the "banned" books in question [0] are:
Jack_London_-_Call_of_the_Wild.epub
Mark_Twain_-_Adventures_of_Huckleberry_Finn.epub
Mark_Twain_-_The_Adventures_of_Tom_Sawyer.epub
Women_in_Love_-_D_H_Lawrence.epub
These books are all available on Amazon for under $10. Further, they are often assigned reading in high school or university literature classes.
A thought experiment by comparison: what if the collection consisted of the following?
- The Camp of the Saints
- Culture of Critique
- The Turner Diaries
Until a recent reprint of the first title (which thanks to The Streisand Effect was one of the top sellers on Amazon), these were all almost impossible to find and / or prohibitively expensive. Note that I don't necessarily agree with the subject matter of these titles, just pointing out collective blindspots so we the people can avoid actual Bans in the not too distant future.
0: https://codeberg.org/rickoooooo/BannedBookLibrary/src/branch...
I thought we would all be over this after the dr seuss thing.
I *love* this concept so much.
Even though the books are a neat hook, these wifi networks could contain anything.
Grassroots political advocacy, local info for off-the-grid historical sites, location specific micro-social media (comments, message boards, etc.), hidden games in obscure places, capture the flag, ...
God, this is just so freaking cool and is begging for a thousand different ideas to run on top of it.
Good job! One of the best things I've seen all year.
If you have a problem with storing illegal books in your "banned book library", you may be working on the wrong project.
The answer should be obvious: it would be a white supremacist library.
Given that the present administration includes fans of those books, their banning seems unlikely. Perhaps a refresher on the kinds of books that are presently under threat is in order? https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10
(You can find contemporary Huck Finn censorship attempts in their database here, by the way: https://airtable.com/appZthgrTU9u1Bf5d/shr4J8Mgiua2CV2Ig?mWW... )
all 4 of the books that are checked-in to that repo are old enough that they're in the public domain. I looked at Call of the Wild and it has a title page saying it came from Project Gutenberg, I assume the other 3 likely did too.
rather than jumping to conclusions about the author being influenced by a "psyop" I think there's a much simpler and more boring explanation - they didn't want to check copyrighted ebooks into a publicly-accessible Codeberg repo.
As the only books in it? Then it'd be best marketed as the "white supremacist conspiracy theorist starter kit". Throw in Mein Kampf while you're at it.
Just because a book is controversial doesn't make it good. No books should be banned, ever. But some books don't need promoting in a curated collection, either. They're useful for people doing literature research and understanding certain subcultures, but unlike the first list, they're not something useful and interesting to promote to a mass market, which makes them not good choices for a project like this.
Books are comparatively tiny, as data goes. If you have the space for a comprehensive list of every book in the public domain, by all means include those in it. But if you're making a curated list of a handful of books, and it's that list? That's certainly a choice.
See also this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549512
It's been a while since I used the github gist 'download zip' functionality. Quite handy.
Y'know, there's really only one reason to be coy about whether you agree with Neo-Nazi propaganda.
There are equivalent books in our own time, and using those instead would make the project feel more like an actual defense of Free Speech and less like a quip of “goodness gracious, people were prudes in the 1920s”, which everyone already agrees with.
- Commissioner Pravin Lal, Datalinks
Alpha Centauri pertinent as ever.
Best 4x game of all time. The 2060 that game envisioned seems closer everyday.
Although, I dread to think what sort of files one would get when user uploads are allowed.
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-...
"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.
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.
Reads like you had fun, keep up the hacking!
P.S main -> mail I think?
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.
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.
LoRa is also sub-optimal for payloads more than a few K in size and most ePub files are at least a meg...
I’ll grant that some of the restrictions seem overprotective. That being said, a parent could easily check out one of these 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.
Very cool project nonetheless!
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 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
every time some random school in bumfuck Alabama removes some LGBT/CRT/DEI/ESG/whatever pamphlet no one was ever going to actually read from its library, every dailybeast/salon/huffingtonpost/motherjones/etc equate that incident to Nazi book burnings. if you want, I can don a hazmat, venture to r/politics, and exhume a dozen threads about such incidents where the target audience of those articles expresses their anger and disappointment over hundreds of near identical comments.
But that’s a good ban of course, because Freedom of Speech only matters when it concerns speech I agree with.
putting hypothetical words in other peoples' mouths like this seems like it must be a pretty exhausting way to try to make a point.
quoting from the article:
> I think the idea hosting banned books specifically came to me after having read Ben Brown's short story Library. It's been a while since I read it, but if I recall there are characters in the story who maintain a "library" which acts as a digital archive of creative works, owners manuals, 3d models, etc. Things that others might find useful or interesting that you wouldn't want to lose should they be somehow wiped from the Internet.
the purpose of a project like this seems to be not just "here's some banned books" but rather "here's some banned books that I think are worth sharing / reading". if you think Mein Kampf belongs on that list, just say so directly.
but also the premise of your comment is wrong, because Mein Kampf is not banned at all: https://www.amazon.com/Mein-Kampf-Adolf-Hitler-ebook/dp/B002...
A library can choose what books they stock (especially a school library. Of course they're highly curated.). You don't have to agree with their choices, but the book isn't banned. You can still find it at a county library, an ebook library, or on the Internet.
So it's a bit dramatic to say "I'm fighting the system by hosting banned books!", just because some Tennessee elementary schoolers can't check it out from their school library. Just feels like a joke and a mockery when there's governments that genuinely censor books.
Edit: per the other comment's Wikipedia link, the unredacted Operation Dark Heart seems banned in the US because it included classified info
Although copyright-infringing books may be illegal to redistribute in general, the difficulty in determining what counts as copyright infringement and what counts as fair use means you can't really tell for sure which books are illegal to distribute and which aren't, so I'm not sure that really counts as "banned". 60 Years Later had an actual court order which makes things a little more concrete.