People inside the oppressive regime will unwittingly buy smart bulbs, that only activate after enough were smuggled in at the same date, so that by the time the regime detects some, all bulbs will be traced to non-refugee sellers outside its jurisdiction, absolving any unwitting participants buying and powering them, so it's important the ad doesn't advertise any quirks or functionality added, as that would compromise the buyers.
By having the sellers be random foreigners (from the perspective of the oppressive regime), the regime can't punish the family of the refugees sponsoring this infiltration, if it doesn't know which refugee friends the seller has (so it should also be a low contact friend, so the refugee would have to convince a friend to do one large batch once, and never meet again..., which is a bit sad).
This assumes commercial entities aren't selling friend network data, or if they do, that oppressive regimes somehow can't get their hands on it. A rather dubious assumption in 2026...
The FBI investigating a bombing? Yeah.
State cops investigating a murder? 50/50 odds?
Local cops investigating someone swapping out a fucking lightbulb? No.
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.), waymarkers, geocaching, hidden music / art / games in obscure places, ARGs like an interactive capture the flag or something even more inventive and fun, ...
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.
And how does that differ from including banned books?
This is not a database of banned books. It is an example showing how you can make a database of banned books of your own.
This is a perfectly sensible set of sample and example books. The project is the book distribution system, not the books themselves.
You load yours up with whatever you think is important or whatever you are willing to risk.
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.
Also, the books on the bulb include Huckleberry Finn, which was removed from required reading in some Democrat-governed California cities because it uses racial slurs.
that was the only point I was making. Mein Kraft, Selected Works of Lmao The Dong, and The Anarchist Cookbook may be removed from sale/access in some specific locations, but it is very much legal to buy, own, and sell them.
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... )
And your "historically banned" is just "occasionally removed from public school libraries on parental request". Not using tax money to promote them to children is a low, low bar for "banned". While actual availability is, of course, completely ignored. Whatever tells the best story, facts be damned.
[1] Jared Taylor's Banned Conference Speech - https://www.arktosjournal.com/p/jared-taylors-banned-confere...
[2] Ohio universities involve FBI in investigation of ‘It’s okay to be white’ and white nationalist group’s postings on campus - https://www.thefire.org/news/ohio-universities-involve-fbi-i...
There's an alternate reality where white supremacy is mainstream, where queer fiction is impossible to find, and that would be a different world.
Instead, what's being preserved are the books written that celebrate the values that match our broad cultural values, despite a handful of cultural deviants attempting to suppress the parts of the rest of humanity they dislike.
Yes, it's called "the past".
That's a significant impugnment of the honesty of a person you know nothing about.
"Banned books" is the colloquial term for these books, even if it's not as accurate as you'd personally prefer.
Next thing you'll be complaining you bit into an Apple and got computer instead of fruit.
Yes, many people are either unaware of, or willing participants in, this lie. That doesn't make it any less of a lie.
You're just pissy because they aren't using your personal favorite parameters around "banned" for "by whom" and "for whom". You're pretending your opinion is fact and therefore anyone who disagrees must be a liar.
And even in high schools screening R-rated movies is generally heavily restricted. Where it is allowed, it generally requires a permission slip from the parents. And that's not like showing gratuitous films, but ones with historically relevant and educational context like e.g. Schindler's List.
So why is it unreasonable for parents (or other interested parties) to be against having such material in a children's library? In many ways its quite odd that a rating system was never adopted for books. And for one other question, do you even see a difference between these sort of books being restricted from schools, and other books whose content would be generally be rated appropriate for children, being banned on political/ideological basis? Because to me the difference is not only tremendous but the defining issue here.
"My" list? I don't have a list. If you're talking about OP's list, I disagree with that. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are not sexual books. From what I know of many of the other more recent books people have tried to ban, I absolutely would not agree the ratings would be R/NC17 for those either. Here's a list of PG13 (And PG!) movies with nudity. https://www.imdb.com/list/ls548607223/
I agree that 7 year olds should not be shown sexual content. There exists content with sexual themes which are appropriate for teenagers.
Also, the comment you replied to is downthread in an argument over whether it's a "lie" to call books that someone banned, a banned book.
The top book on that 'challenged' list is a diary style book of a 13 year old girl who is sold into sex slavery, repeatedly raped, abused, and so on - with descriptions of each 'encounter.' The book is meant to be, and indeed is, extremely disturbing as it's part of the author's activism against sex trafficking throughout the world - as it was based on real events as per her research. In any case, it most certainly is not PG13 by any stretch of the imagination. It's much closer to something like Requiem for a Dream than it is to Tomb Raider.
I also think that's a great book to have on top, because it emphasizes that the issue isn't ideological, but content. I think there's few people who would claim Sold doesn't have tremendous value, or that it should be banned. But there's going to be a lot of people that don't want books like that anywhere near children. And for good reason - it's the same reason I wouldn't really care if my kids wanted to watch Total Recall or Terminator, but no way would I let them watch Requiem for a Dream. The violence and triple titted aliens of Total Recall are borderline comical, but I don't think stuff that gives you that awful 'ughhhh' feeling like Requiem for a Dream (or indeed - Sold) is something that's going to be at all healthy for a child's development.
We no longer say that "cannabis is illegal in California"; that would be factually incorrect. Instead we say, "cannabis was formerly illegal". In standard usage of English, the same pattern applies to banned vs formerly banned books.
Edit: wording
It deliberately conveys an impression that is opposite of the truth. But feel free to continue to split hairs and twist words to argue that technically you're not actually lying.
Just because you decided to interpret something one way, doesn't mean it was a deliberate choice by the other party, nor does it mean your interpretation is common.
> technically you're not actually lying.
What did I say that you consider a lie? Could you quote me?
What's so triggering in using, as examples, books that were once banned?
It's getting weird seeing how you're going on and on and on about that aftee the author has explained why these books.
I thought we would all be over this after the dr seuss thing.
>- Culture of Critique
>- The Turner Diaries
Actual banned books. So of course your comment is flagged. Groupthink censorship is still censorship.
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.
Straight to the ad hominem attack on taboo thoughts. Transparent. If the books are true what is your problem with them? Not me. Not the other poster. Not a strawman fallacy. What is your issue with the content of actually banned books? Be specific.
Well. I seem to have triggered something.
> Ah yes, because the only people that have ever spread propaganda are Neo-Nazis
Not something I ever said or implied.
> and we should only ever learn about the sanitized and approved version of history from our Robert Maxwell (Ghislane Maxwell's Mossad agent father / McGraw Hill co-founder) published textbooks.
I find it interesting who just happens to know who else is Jewish, and then feels the need to interject that into utterly irrelevant contexts.
> Never mind that there are two sides to every story, and when it comes to history, only the victors get to tell theirs.
No, I'm pretty sure a lot of losers have been able to have their sides heard. It's just that, well, people lose for a reason, and losers tend to be less popular among normal people. Ranting about subhumans can do that, you know.
> We don't even learn about the 23+ million massacred by the Bolsheviks in school.
I would be interested to know who exactly you call a Bolshevik, but I did get taught the history of the USSR in school, at least, and "One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich" is not a ringing endorsement.
However, nobody was talking about Bolsheviks until you decided to use them as a distraction.
> But yeah - only one reason to consider a different perspective other than the one forced down your throat by the public education system.
I didn't need the public education system to teach me to hate genocidal racists, thank you.
We're only talking about one political group here. The group that published The Turner Diaries. The group that can't help but mention who's Jewish. Bringing up other groups is a distraction tactic, aside from how dishonest it is. Yes, we are taught that everyone did morally questionable things in WWII. But only one group ran a Dachau.
> How is the owner of the second largest publisher of textbooks in the US, and the fact that he served in a Zionist intelligence organization in the US, irrelevant when it comes to what people learn about WWII and propaganda? Please explain.
OK, let's get down to brass tacks: Do you think people only believe the Holocaust happened and was bad because a Jewish man published a lot of textbooks?
> Are you disputing the well-recorded fact that tens of millions of innocents were killed by the Bolsheviks over the span of about 40 years?
Are you disputing the fact eleven million people were killed by a concerted effort on the part of Nazi Germany to eliminate people it considered subhuman for various reasons?
I don't dispute the vile stain on the history of state Communism. I hate Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Hoxha and Kim Il-Sung just as much as the next normal person. But we're talking about why someone wouldn't distribute The Turner Diaries and, I have to say, the Communists didn't commit that little literary peccadillo.
> Why don't we learn about the Holodomor in the US in grade school?
Because there are fewer people waving hammer-and-sickle flags around than there are spray-painting swastikas on synagogues and Raising Questions about whether the Holocaust was so bad after all.
> I never said you did - but if it were me, I'd want to make sure I considered both sides of a historical event before deciding which direction to aim my hatred, if I was into such endeavors.
That's funny, the more I learn about WWII the less I feel the Nazis had a legitimate side. They were a bunch of losers lead around by a drugged-up corporal who ran his country into the ground with gross mismanagement to the point Germany, once the jewel of European science and industry, was split in half and lived a shadow existence as the puppet of two world powers for a half century after his reign.
> I personally believe that war is a racket, and that there are no good guys in evil and corrupt wars (WWII was definitely one of those, same with WWI).
The corruption in WWII was the starting of it, which falls directly at the feet of the Nazis and Imperial Japan. Self-defense is not corruption, and neither is ending the reign of expansionist tyrants. Or do you think people don't have the right to defend themselves from your pet dictators?
> I'm also not naive enough to believe that there wasn't atrocious behavior on both sides of either war.
Only one side ran death camps. Both sides imprisoned people unjustly, but only one side turned them into ashes. It doesn't balance out.
> Nor am I going to label anyone who has the gall to question the prevailing narrative or say it is incorrect in some capacity, a Neo-Nazi.
No, the only people I call Neo-Nazis are the ones triggered when I say the Nazis were, on the whole, bad for everyone around them.
is a strange example since it was just a complex of work camps, with the Japanese, British and so on having far worse than that.
> Because there are fewer people waving hammer-and-sickle flags around than there are spray-painting swastikas on synagogues and Raising Questions about whether the Holocaust was so bad after all.
The hyperbole weakens the point / or where are you to see constant Nazis? In the US, Mexico and Germany I regularly see hammer and sickle flags, t-shirts and graffiti. In Mexico city right now, there are huge banners with Stalin and Lenin, besides Marx and Engels, draped across traffic lights and streets all over the center, while it's been almost 10 years since the only big nazi protest I'm aware of (Charlottesville)
Those of us who paid attention certainly did.
If that simple, easily checkable fact doesn't get your hackles up I would know why that it doesn't.
Of course they aren't. But that's no argument for distributing it.
If you want to distribute it in a box labeled "extremist propaganda", to study it as such, sure.
But if your society has some extremist propaganda in the wild, distributing more, different extremist propaganda will make things strictly worse.
Go on then.
Say what you mean.
That doesn’t mean Nazi Germany wasn’t utterly disgusting though.
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.
But that’s a good ban of course, because Freedom of Speech only matters when it concerns speech I agree with.
OP is not even slightly wrong to leave out texts they disagree with. Theres no hypocrisy here. They have the Freedom to not publish works.
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...
Those aren’t banned books though. They are books that used to be banned in another century.
It’s like saying “I’m a criminal because I criticized the Pope”.
as has been covered in multiple comments elsewhere in the thread, the "banned" books that are checked-in to the repo are examples that were used because they're in the public domain.
There is one reason someone would do that. You're a white supremacist and a Nazi. There's no in-between here. How about you fuck right off with all that? No tolerance for Nazis and racists.
>There is one reason someone would do that. You're a white supremacist and a Nazi. There's no in-between here. How about you fuck right off with all that? No tolerance for Nazis and racists.
And good faith is straight out the window. Are you afraid because non-banned books and films told you they were bad, or because the people who produced those were afraid they were right and didn't want you to know that they were right?
You're advocating censorship. The good guys have not once in history ever needed to do that.
>Are you afraid because non-banned books and films told you they were bad, or because the people who produced those were afraid they were right and didn't want you to know that they were right?
How about you be more explicit, instead of hiding? You're saying shit like The Turner Diaries, a book that advocates for race war, white supremacy, and adoration of Hitler. You're saying the people who wrote those books might be right. You're saying the Nazis were right.
I know what you're doing, and you know what you're doing. As I said, fuck off with all that, no tolerance for the intolerant.
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
The opposite of 'banned books' making it false advertising.
Right everything is available freely unless you are a school student in which case you are a special class whom censorship can be practiced upon without any self reflection.
Its crazy I know, but maybe you are the one steeped in propaganda to the point where you have supported a bunch of anti speech, anti publishing laws, regulations and policies. And that, this lightbulb, such as it is, is designed specifically to avoid the censorship that you support?