Cool project, except these aren't really "banned" books. thats a misleading term. In most of these cases, the book isn’t actually banned. Nobody is being arrested for owning it, Amazon isn’t forbidden from selling it, and adults can still read it whenever they want.
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.
>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.
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"?
i agree, with a bit more nuance. it's one thing for a government agency staffed by educational professionals (like a public school district) to issue guidance (or even rules) on how libraries should be stocked -- but what's become widespread is legislative bodies bypassing those existing structures and issuing laws without input from educational professionals.
Words exist in a context. "User was banned from a site" and "Book is banned" have different connotations. You have to be purposely obtuse to conflate these.
just like how you can figure out when tom/dan say "we've banned this account" doesn't mean "banned this account from the internet", you can use similar context clues to figure out "banned book" doesn't mean "banned across the world and is now illegal".
I mean, when you're like "I have to make a hidden wifi server in a light bulb to distribute these books" that does kind of imply some dystopian totalitarian state that will put you to death for reading those books or something and not the reality that they are given their own highlighted section in literally every single bookstore in existence.
Did you read the article? The author doesn’t say anything like that.
It’s pretty clear this was mostly a fun idea with a bit of “could be useful in this scenario” motivation, which they mention came from reading a short story.
On my news feed today I saw a Newsweek story about how someone found a dvd of Birth of a Nation at Goodwill, not knowing what the plot was.
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.
I think of stuff like Luty who was challenged in the UK under the terrorism act for sharing books on improvised firearms, Ashley Dugan who was charged with "distributing explosives training to terrorists" and some of his youtube videos pulled for sharing the well known public domain synthesis of RDX explosives.
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.
The problem is that there isn’t really a better term, and using “banned” gives the correct impression for most people to see the problem.
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.
I find the trend of redefining or twisting terms to serve a specific cause really counterproductive. It eventually devalues the words themselves and makes nuanced discussion nearly impossible. If a problem is really that serious, it shouldn't require misleading language.
In the context of supplying banned books in the software of a lightbulb, I expect banned to mean a China style ban where possession can get you punished. Not the (current) US version where certain taxpayer funded entities cannot provide the book.
But there might not be a better word for the latter scenario. Surely, few oppose libraries from “banning” pornographic books, so some level of discretion must be used by administrators.
From what I can find with a quick look, 'Banned' is most likely using PEN America[1]'s definition, which is “either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished.”
[1] Free speech non-profit mostly focused on literature.
Some that comes to mind: violence, -phobia, fascism, nazism, rape, genocide, supremacy, safety, political, diversity, man/woman.
In the context of this thread, it would be calling a book a "banned book" because it is banned in some school libraries, despite being widely available everywhere else. Akin to calling dogs a "banned pet" because they are banned from post offices. Technically correct but highly misleading without context.
I suspect that the same applies to most of the words that came to your mind; they're just being used in contexts you politically disagree with and therefore it's a "misuse". (Seinfeld's "soup nazi" was a misuse. Putin's use of the same word is a misuse. Descriptions of modern nationalist movements and the powers that support them are descriptive.)
There is a concept for pets called "banned breeds" (e.g., "pit bulls") that are similarly politically motivated in the same way that book banning happens.
But the problem is that with very few exception, it's not serious at all. Public libraries already make curation choices with politics in mind, school libraries already make curation choices with content moderation in mind, etc. In order to make it something approaching a real problem you have to invent potential laws that some states like Florida might make in the future.
This is admitting that its intentionally misleading, which is lying and is bad. You just think that it's an rhetorically effective term. When I walk into a public library and I see a display a books for "banned books week" that includes The Catcher in the Rye and The Color Purple, two of the most best selling books ever which are commonly assigned reading in schools, it's so obvious that the whole thing is a farce.
it doesn't need to apply globally for something to be banned. it doesn't need to be illegal across the country. something can be banned from a certain place (e.g. a school). it's still correct to say it is banned.
some HNers are so weird when it comes to the word "banned" regarding books, i really dont understand why. its only ever in the context of school/library books. use "ban" in the sense of "banned from the forum" or similar, and no one bats an eye.
why dont people get worked up when tom/dang "ban" someone from HN? they haven't made it illegal for that user to visit HN.
Because they're not "not allowed". With very few exceptions the thing people are freaking out about is books being curated out of libraries, usually for very understandable reasons.
It isn’t intentionally misleading, at best it is an over simplification of what is happening.
It is a fact that there is a government lead effort in various states to ban books from k-12 libraries. That part of this is not up for debate because it is happening. So they are in fact “banned”. As a society we generally accept that words have more complicated or nuanced meanings when connected to other words, as “banned” is in this case.
We also as a society generally accept that those other words may be implied or require looking at something for more than a minute to understand the context. If you are in a country where a book is actually banned, I would wager that you would likely just say “this book is banned” implying it is banned where you are instead of adding in “this book is banned here in X” since it would be unnecessary to say and would be generally understood.
If you don’t like the word than propose another word.
You may be overthinking this. "Banned" in this case means that the usual person or people who choose what books to include are being overridden by a party with more clout. From the perspective of a school librarian, for example, book X has been banned. They no longer have the option of including it. (This is even true in the case where the librarian would not have included it anyway, for their own reasons.) They are prevented by the school board, an angry mob of parents, the state legislature, the FBI, or whoever. The fact that the public library down the road carries the book does not change whether that librarian has the option of including it in their school library's collection. They can't. They are banned from including it.
The FBI is not telling school librarians to not stock copies of To Kill a Mockingbird. I really don't see the issue with local entities like a school board having some say in material that is available in a school. That can differ across the country, and thats fine. That's what our country is supposed to be like.
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.
How is this different from banning alcohol or pets or weapons or any other thing? Whether or not you can buy and have at a different location doesn't mean the word is misleading.
Maybe something like "not library available" or "lending restricted"?
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.
> (4) The Attorney General may investigate compliance with this section. The contracting party must report to the Attorney General a provider's failure to comply with subsection (2) of this section no later than thirty (30) days after the contracting party learns of the provider's noncompliance. Such a report shall constitute a public record under the Mississippi Public Records Act.
If these were actually banned books people would be a lot less enthusiastic about the endeavor. Pretty much every book that is genuinely banned, in that no publisher or printing house will print it and no bookstore will sell it, is either a racist diatribe, how to make bombs, or similar. These books on the other hand are books that one librarian or school admin somewhere in this vast country decided would no longer be included in their small library. Not very interesting.
Cool, dude, keep defending books with gay characters being banned in some libraries... I mean, not "curated".
A "Ban" doesn't have to be universal for it to still be banned in one spot. A book banned in a Christian high school but available at a public library is still a "Banned book" because it has been banned somewhere.
If you're that bad with semantics, I'd recommend the next book you check out is the dictionary.
“As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth’s final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”
Peak free information flow was in 2010. When "social" media had its big break through, and nobody had learned how to control it yet. That time gave us the occupy movement, the Arab spring, and lots of hacktivism for the social good (mostly under the Anonymous umbrella).
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
I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss.
Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever screams at us the loudest. (from S2 Andor)
The loss of objectivity is one of the greatest losses. People who are online to want their trench to “win” are advocates for loss. People who abuse their position to only proclaim their side is the best, the all-knowing, the superior, or whatever the flavor is of the day, are advocates for loss.
And as we have seen, we are losing a lot by losing objectivity.
Yeah. I was saying "twitter gives you a revolution whether you need one or not". It's not automatic that the revolution will be progressive. And in the case of the Arab Spring, a liberal revolution gave rise to elections which brought in a much less liberal government, which is why the whole thing collapsed in short order.
But social media is also uniquely good at developing "negative polarization". Some of the counter movement was organic simply because people hated the progressive wins they saw.
> We have abundant free flow of information today and yet I see a rise of tyranny.
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.
We went from restricting the sharing of information to making information sharing unpopular.
If you ban or censor a book, you immediately make the book seem more valuable. Because governments aren't omnipotent and all restrictions can be overcome (see the war on drugs as a particularly recent and pertinent example), you just Streisand-effect yourself.
If, on the other hand, you take away the popularity and social status of those who read that book, branding them as gullible idiots in the popular imagination, people will have an aversion to reading it. You don't need to ban access to the book, in fact you shouldn't do that, just make sure that talking about it will get people to lose all their friends.
Social media are the modern arbiters of popularity. If social media bans a subject, people get angry. If it just quietly deboosts anybody who talks about that subject, "well let's better not do that, we tried and people really didn't like those videos I guess"
You pretty much described why I quit “social” media wholesale. It’s a turf war and nothing goods comes from it that cannot be got elsewhere at a vastly higher quality.
> If social media bans a subject, people get angry. If it just quietly deboosts anybody who talks about that subject, "well let's better not do that, we tried and people really didn't like those videos I guess"
Isn't this basically just a form of forced compliance ? I agree it's happening, but its happening because the ideas/information is not beneficial for the one who can control the distribution. Before anyone could post on usenet, add their own tinfoil hat blog if they wanted, but take the UK for now, if there is any discussion or interaction with people on your website, the government wants your ID and your users'. It's exhausting.
This is essentially how das kapital got discredited in the public consciousness.
If you browse any CS career forum though, at least 60% of the complaints about "the industry" happen in most capitalist industries and typically have one or more corresponding chapters in das kapital (e.g. one of the various forms of alienation, treadmill effect, capital accumulation, the creation of a reserve army of labour).
>there is more restriction than ever of the distribution of information
I don't think it sounds true. Pre-internet, information distribution required access to specific technical tools, and physical transportation efforts. As one of USSR dissidents noted, risks of distribution grew almost exponentially with amount of pages (and it's about imprisonment, not account deletion). For comparison, emailing so far works even in very repressive countries. And even narrowing the issue to the West, while free speech suffered a lot recently, shadowbanned account is probably still works better than hectograph.
> there is more restriction than ever of the distribution of information.
There's an endless source of information if you look for it. Just because social media doesn't stuff them in your face doesn't mean they're censored.
On the other hand, you can shove proof in people's faces and they'll still find reasons to argue against it. Information availability is not the problem. It's more energy consuming to search and filter information so people largely avoid doing it.
There's a trope in movies where the antagonist is secretly recorded and broadcast so regular people finally see the truth and wake up. I've seen journalists risking their carriers to expose corruption only for people to shrug and look the other way.
Not entirely true. Many science is gatekeeped, as well as other types of information. May books require illegal services to be obtained, or money (when available). Information about facts is buried in a lot of misinformation. Free flow is very hard to obtain!
Unfortunately we do not have a solution for countering this kind of a 'denial of service' attack on information consumption.
It is trivial to concoct believable lies as compared to the effort needed to debunk them in a way that is effective at social scale.
Perhaps the only weapon is to teach how to think for oneself. Who is going to invest in that in a scale necessary? Those who have the resources to do that do not have sufficient motivation. Often the motivation to do the opposite is stronger.
> we do not have a solution for countering this kind of a 'denial of service' attack
Umm, wouldn't a simple solution be going back to linear news feed that only includes updates from people you follow rather than the algorithm deciding what content to push to you?
Indeed. And with AI and video generation, it's now (or within months) literally undetectable. The closer we get to US midterms, the more we'll see how bad it really can get this time around.
And the US elections in 2028? I can barely imagine.
And the massive problem is, most people I talk to still think what they see on youtube is real. But of course, people thought the TV show Survivor was real, too. It's not a new phenomenon.
But it is at crazy levels. I like your 'denial of service' designation, because even knowing the problem, maybe you can't find real info still.
Yes and no I think. If you analyse it, the censors will work to actually block channels where the truth can be shared. What's left over time is only the government sanctioned media, which over time becomes more and more corrupt with disinformation. So I think I agree with your second sentence but not your first, in that if we didn't pretend to fight disinformation, I think we wouldn't have so much of it.
We don't. Search engines return a limited number of results from "trusted media" and dissident opinion, whether balanced or batshit crazy, is all lumped together as misinformation and conspiracy theory.
Actually they or at least social media does or used to do, peaking during the panny-d and dismantling the 'fake news' checks and balances during Trump II.
In Italy a left wing writer and historian declared publicly he was going to vote a certain way on a referendum and facebook flagged it as "fake news"… how could it be fake news if it was clearly just his own opinion and intent on what to do.
I wish they would release a remastered version of the game with updated graphics and movies, with nothing else changed. The game mechanics were great. Beyond Earth was not good in comparison.
As a child I never liked the AI's strategy to plop cities down right next to each other. I should see if I can understand that as an adult. If I was designing a remake/remaster it wouldn't even have updated graphics just change the AI.
BE was so bland. Both in design and in terms of gameplay. Terrain affected like nothing.
I found the strat to go was to spam Scouts for resources, then get that upgrade that gave you Science per deal and spam every cheap deal as soon as you can.
"Already we have turned all of our critical industries... over to these... things... these lumps of silver and paste we call nanorobots. And now we propose to teach them intelligence? What, pray tell, will we do when these little homunculi awaken one day and announce that they have no further need of us?"
The "information wants to be free" discourse of just under 30 years ago feels so charmingly naive now that we've seen how lies are also information and can travel even better using the same flow.
What exactly is this "information wants to be free" discourse? The arguments for and against freedom of speech as a foundational social principle span at least 300 continuous years.
The discussions about intellectual property rights are quite recent, but the idea that "lies are also information and can travel even better using the same flow" was well-explored over 300 years of discussions about freedom of speech (and not only discussions, but also jailings, executions, witch hunts, etc).
I think it should be pretty obvious that dissemination of information and lies today—when you can’t even know if the person on the other side is real or from your own country—is much different than 300 years ago. The “information wants to be free” motivation is much closer to the world of today than the one in your distant past.
More importantly, I don’t understand why you’re so hung up on that. What difference does it make? If you agree with the conclusion, why are the dates of when the idea started so important? It doesn’t matter to the discussion, it’s only distracting from the point.
> I think it should be pretty obvious that dissemination of information and lies today much different than 300 years ago.
Of course, so what? If your implication is that none of the arguments made over 300 years are relevant today, I would say it is pretty obviously completely wrong.
> when you can’t even know if the person on the other side is real or from your own country
Did people in England and France use to know the authors of seditious pamphlets that were produced in the Dutch Republic and smuggled into those countries? Most of them were anonymous. Not only they didn't know the authors, the authors 100% were enabled by foreign actors.
> it’s only distracting from the point
The point: we've seen recently how damaging the fast spread of lies is therefore only naive fools would be against information control. My rebuttal: we've seen how damaging lies are for 300 years, yet it is a deep ongoing debate that many great thinkers contributed to, therefore it is not just a matter of fools believing into something.
Or do you see "the point" to be something different?
Nowhere does it say that “information wants to be free” was the originator of the idea. It’s merely anchoring it to something recent HN readers have a good likelihood of being acquainted with. It’s like someone used Avatar to discuss how colonialism is portrayed in media, and someone came along to say “Pocahontas did it way before”. Alright, but that doesn’t matter for the argument. We’re discussing the idea itself, its origins do not make a difference for the matter.
I’ll ask again:
> If you agree with the conclusion, why are the dates of when the idea started so important?
> No, the point is that for the purposes of this discussion it is irrelevant when the arguments were first made.
How is that irrelevant if the whole statement is literally about when the arguments were first made and supposedly disproven?
> Nowhere does it say that “information wants to be free” was the originator of the idea.
It literally says __now__ that we've seen how lies are also information and can travel even better using the same flow, as if it is something recent.
> It’s like someone used Avatar to discuss how colonialism is portrayed in media, and someone came along to say “Pocahontas did it way before”. Alright, but that doesn’t matter for the argument. We’re discussing the idea itself, its origins do not make a difference for the matter.
If someone says that our views on colonialism were naive before Avatar 2 changed our perception of Avatar, of course it is fair to mention Pocahontas and 300 years of nuanced discussions of colonialism.
Why do you assuming only true information is information. Information can be anything not to mention that the definition of truths and lies can change with time and location.
Years ago there was PirateBox: flash a small Wifi access point with a custom firmware that's a webserver that hosts a forum/filehost. Their website is dead, but here's a mod of the project; https://www.jasongriffey.net/librarybox/
Although, I dread to think what sort of files one would get when user uploads are allowed.
I built a PirateBox with an old Asus access point once. It was a bit of a dissapointing experience. Mostly because people were scared to access an open wifi point. Plus it did not 'give one free internet' so people usually immediately disconnected.
Unfortunately the Library Box mod is also no longer an active project.
A hidden “book server” like this could be set up in just about any electronic device with a sufficiently powerful microcontroller. But I think there is something delightfully poetic about using a source of light to spread suppressed knowledge.
I have seen these described as Pirate Boxes before, way back around 2012. The basic idea is a box that throws up a wifi network and web server letting people upload/download files to it, while remaining disconnected from the wider internet. A geographically limited digital sharing library.
Android loves to auto-disconnect you from any Wifi network that doesn't provide Internet. You need to go through a bunch of arcane settings to disable that feature.
Also a thing to consider for some digital audio mixers. Many can broadcast an AP for use with a tablet/pc for app-control. No way in hell I'm connecting my mixer to the internet during a show! The last thing I need is some script kiddy DDoS'ing the mixer and crashing my console.
You can spoof internet by responding to http gets on any IP. Last I checked phones didn’t require a valid https certificate as part of their portal detection.
This was my thought as well. I think the workaround is to have the device present itself as a captive portal type of thing, like you might encounter at a Starbucks, so that when the user is prompted to "Sign In" they immediately find the dead drop.
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.
Makes me wonder if credential harvesting is a thing when all these smart bulbs and other IoT devices get thrown away with the Wi-Fi credentials stored on them.
I watched the whole thing, and I think it sort of went off the rails over time, probably to keep upping the ante. I think you're fine just watching the first season
"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.
I think the point was that it's difficult to notice in the first place, not that it would be hard to find once you know you're looking for something. You don't have a black WiFi router with antennae dangling down from the ceiling.
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?
Just walk around with a Wi-Fi analyzer on your phone, playing hotter/colder until you 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.
So many objects have their own networks now. With a clever SSID and placement in a room full of potential targets, it could be pretty tough for someone to narrow it down to the bulb.
while true i think it's extremely unlikely to be suspicious of a light bulb.
especially if it doesn't seem out of place, like if it's on a light socket why think that it's an wifi access point?
I'd be interested in the banned book list. A glance at the socials with the biggest one missing suggests there will be no interesting books on it. Just the ones you can find in "banned books" stands at mainstream bookstores. Absolute mediocrity of thought free of meaningful diversity.
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
Per the article, the bulb only had 4 MB storage and the idea is that each bulb's library would be a reflection of its creator. So there is no one list. Put whatever you want on it.
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.
But it is so spatially limited, only accessible within the wifi range of the bulb, it would be pretty challenging to thoroughly root these out from across a city or region.
A thumb drive would be even harder but more obvious in its purpose. The bulb is good because it hides in plain sight. But it requires being within sight to be meaningful. But once it is it’ll be broadcasting its existence over standard protocols.
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.
This project and especially one of the closing notes[1] reminds me of a more mature DIY project to make a mesh node using a simple solar lamp[2]. I love the creativity on display here and I especially appreciate all the links to the other blogs and sites that helped you along the way.
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
Data transfer is so, so extremely limited over Meshtastic it probably wouldn't be worth it for anything larger than a few dozen kB. There are a lot of documents and books that could fit into such a small size perhaps but no novels.
oh this is awesome, i've always thought it could be cool to leave always connect hubs around town. ESP32's would be to awkward but a bunch of lightbulbs would blend right in!
Anyone looking for local-first smart bulbs, plugs, etc with Tasmota or ESPHome I can thoroughly recommend https://www.mylocalbytes.com/ - not affiliated in any way, just a very happy customer.
Almost the entire article is about turning a light bulb into a Wi-Fi hotspot/web server, and your takeaway was, well actually, _The Color Purple_ is not technically banned.
Unless I missed something I only spotted two book examples since that wasn't the focus of the article.
It's just tech enthusiasts being socially inept. There is literally no discourse to be had from this comment, infact it only serves to detract from the main point of the article
“Banned books” is just a safe term to use for something whose real purpose would be to facilitate sharing warez, snuff films, child porn, whistleblowing… etc. Get a grip.
It's a needed comment since the first word in the title is 'Banned' and in typical online discourse the comments go down-hill into a rant against ideology/politics.
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.
Which is understandable, but only to a point - the problem was that a lot of banned books were also frequently anti-establishment or critical of the regime.
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.
The cynical side of me wonders if some books might be "banned" on purpose to have the distinction of being a banned book. Probably few books are actually that way, but these days it seems like a shortcut to notoriety
It definitely gets used as a tool to get attention, but let’s be real, nobody is getting rich selling cheap paperbacks in 2026. If you’ve ever been around a school district targeted by the moms for liberty or whatever, it’s a very real thing.
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.
To be fair to the folks playing metal backwards, some 80s bands did include backward encoded messages about satan. It was likely publicity stunts to rile people up though. Include something controversial for marketing.
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" :-)
Whenever I hear about "banned books" they're usually so banned that Barnes & Noble has a prominent "banned books" display selling them at the store entrance. It's all marketing.
quite interesting to find hackable hardware in commodity looking smart devices.
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.
I'm guessing the website is currently being hugged to death, but the images take a while to load, and I'm on a pretty good connection. Maybe try webp with some decent compression to shrink down the filesize?
I think calling them "banned" is so disingenuous. There are actual banned books that are illegal to own in the United States. None of these "banned books" come anywhere close to meeting that criteria.
Zero books are banned by name in the USA. Certain content is: Classified documents (although this is just illegal to share as the one with the original clearance, not to publish/read/possess after), child abuse material, and copyright violations all come to mind.
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.
Yeah, I just disagree with the terminology of calling something "banned", which makes it seem a lot more dire than it is. Local book curation at a school-district level doesn't seem newsworthy to me, which is what the whole "banned books" term seems to stem from.
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.
In 2021 the company that holds the rights to Dr. Seuss books, founded by his family after his death, announced that they would stop printing several of his books because they judged them to be racist against nonwhites: https://apnews.com/article/dr-seuss-books-racist-images-d8ed... . This isn't a government ban on the content of the books, but rather the legitimate copyright owner refusing to print them for their own ideological reasons.
Once the books go out of copyright they will no longer be able to legally prevent anyone else from printing the books, and copyright law doesn't prevent people from legally reselling their already-purchased copies of books. But if you go onto Amazon right now and look at prices, you'll find that a copy of one of the Dr. Seuss books that the rights-holder refuses to print more copies of, such as McElligot's Pool, costs over 100 dollars; whereas a Dr. Seuss book that the rights-holders haven't judged as racist, such as The Cat in the Hat, costs about $5.
I'm not really sure how this is exactly pertinent to a discussion on books being banned. A copyright holder can choose to cease publication for any reason, that's categorically different than a ban. Perhaps it's a point in a broader argument about copyright.
There must be some book with actually banned content in it, right? Especially copyright violations. They could include a PDF of some Linux source code but with MIT license.
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.
It is not disingenuous, maybe a little loose on the 'meaning', but your definition is rather narrow. The Color Purple has been challenged many times in order to be removed from public library circulation and public school curriculums. Annie on my Mind was banned from the Kansas Public School system and subject to book burnings at the federal courthouse. The removal of the book (ban?) was overturned by the court. There are many similar examples of this on banned book lists. Colloquially, the term 'banned' is used often to encompass books that are actually banned, challenged, or illegally removed from public spaces due to a group actively censoring literature for various reasons. I think that general use is fine rather than being pedantic about it considering the social and intellectual costs involved. To call a book that is removed from circulation illegally not banned because there is no law banning it is foolish, since that is a reoccurring tactic among groups applying censorship on communities.
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.
It is subjective. I believe the application or suggestion here is if you are in a community that denies people under 18 the right to have access to certain books over philosophical differences, you can create a book server and give them access to books. If you live in a state, or institution in your example, that will legally punish you or worse for selling or owning a book, you can create a book server. The two are not different really, the systems/people that are limiting the access to literature and information through varying means of enforcement are trying to achieve the same ends, state enforced censorship and control.
In the article example, to deny this because of a technically or the degree of legal enforcement is foolish since it is rebelling against the act of banning books, the process of banning, which doesn't occur out of thin air, it is an evolution of acts. It is not an absolute and one doesn't have to wait until there is a legally defined ban to start the protest. That would be ridiculous as it would be too late.
I don't think the project is trying to make the Banned Library of Congress either, anyone could put whatever books they want on their server. It is suggesting civil disobedience by circumventing oppression through censorship with creativity, which is awesome.
> It is not disingenuous, maybe a little loose on the 'meaning', but your definition is rather narrow
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
Why stop there? While meshtastic would require additional hardware, tor entry exit nodes would not. Nor would other mesh protocols… also as for hosting ideas… the text files? Def cad and related models… skies the limit with space the only limiting factor.
Well written.
That it was written at all is a strong comment on the state of our world where we have an improbable amount of data, but nothing to read.
I'm surprised there are banned books with 1st amendment exists in America? I'm curious as to what these are. I think its rather silly that books can be banned.
Whenever I encounter some news article regarding “banned” books I dig a little deeper and typically discover that some library or elementary school simply put an age restriction on those titles.
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.
You would be correct there are no "banned books" in America.
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.
Relying on the ultra mainstream wikipedia for a banned book would be hilarious if it weren't so deeply disappointing. They'll list nothing interesting.
The point is that those books aren't actually banned for general access. They may not be present in a school library, but you can certainly get them on Amazon.
There's a certain amount of censorship of classified information published by (ex-)military, and that kind of thing, but it can be and is challenged in court.
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.
Jordan Derrick (Ashley Dugan) recently had a youtube video on making RDX pulled and criminally charged with "distribution of explosives information to terrorists" for publicly sharing the public domain patented/documented synthesis (going back to a German patent all the way in the 19th century IIRC) of RDX explosives and denied bail for "hate speech" of using the Israeli flag as a doormat (which was actually in the indictment).
have you you checked out "esp32-s3" which costs $7.12 and has wifi and microsd installed on it [0]. Also esp32-cam is another board with similar specifications.
In the USA, the books that are banned are for public schools. They talk about topics like (gasp) LGBTQ and sex things!
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.
>In the USA, the books that are banned are for public schools. They talk about topics like (gasp) LGBTQ and sex things!
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.
(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.)
NoMoreNicksLeft conveniently left out the (singular!) banned book they were referring to. I believe that was by intent, to make the strawman unassailable.
And its easy to attack books in k-12 school libraries. The hard conservative christians attack DEI, sexuality, suicide, witchcraft, and other things regularly.
However, we are also seeing direct attacks on funding with public libraries.
They almost had their funding yanked to keep librarians from putting LGBTQ books on the shelves. These christian nationalists would rather destroy public libraries than allow (gasp!) books on subjects they dont like.
And as far as I can tell, the solution as of May 21 2026, was that the 4 republicans on the board voted to segregate all the aforementioned topics to the adult section. They also voted to remove the ALA's Library Bill of Rights. And who is this "They" who rewote it? "Alliance Defending Freedom", a christian nationalist group known for LGBTQ hatred.
And all of this shit is in the name of children and "harmful to minors". (Geeee, where have we seen this using children for terrible shit before? Perhaps age verification?)
Im not always for democrats, as many of them are statist stooges as well. But book banning and threatening to shut down libraries is well within fascist and nazi regimes.
Your one page shocker doesnt address anything I said. It just shows how sexually backwards you want older children and young adults to be.
From Wikipedia the book is intended for 12-18, or a better description, someone who is going through or has gone through puberty. This is the same age where children start to learn themselves and others as a sexual beings we are. And in Judaism, a 12 year old IS an adult, religiously speaking. Bar|Bat mitzvah.
And even in the US across most (all?) states, a 16 year old can legally have sex. Pictures however are "child porn" or csam, for fuck-if-i-know reason. But sex? 100% legal.
And again, *pretending* this doesnt exist, or hiding or destroying this knowledge is NEVER a good solution. Adolescents are going to get knowledge. Id rather them get the correct knowledge, rather than slop, misinformation, or worse. And its even harder for LGBTQ folks. So much hate (by people like you) have been aimed at us. We've got a tough path. We would rather accurate descriptions be shown, rather than shit like Chick Tracts.
But ive dealt with people like yourself who use shame and disgust when talking about sex. Ive also seen where that leads, and how utterly backwards and ignorant those adult children are. And that ignorance of sex is actually more dangerous than 'harming' their sensibilities.
Thats how you get rape and sexual assault, by not talking of consent. Thats how you get pregnancy, by not talking how sperm and eggs work. Thats how you get STDs, by not discussing sexual diseases and how to protect yourself from them.
At one job I worked at (food service), had a 19 year old woman think if she had sex standing up, the semen would run out of her vagina and she wouldnt get pregnant. 2 months later, she was pregnant.
Another job in food service I worked at hired a 18 year old lady who was heavily indoctrinated by extremist christian home schooling. She didnt even know the definition or how sex worked. Her parents kept it from her. She ended up asking her coworkers on breaks what it was about. We all recognized the severe harm done to her, and tried to help where we could. Questions she asked that we couldnt answer, we directed her to the public library. (These days, the cristian nationalist trash types dont even want that to be an avenue.)
Nice strawman you constructed. However, it was burning the moment you put it together.
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
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 actually a very interesting lecture for any critical mind, like also The Holy Bible is a very interesting lecture for any atheist.
"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.
If I, as a person who is firmly opposed to racism, wishes to read the Turner Diaries, why shouldn’t I be allowed to?
Do you really think some stupid book by some racist wackjob is going to sway my deepest values? Can you not imagine a legitimate reason why I would want to read such a book? For example, to see what these people are thinking so I can be better prepared to answer their arguments if I’m ever forced to argue with one?
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.
Why would you ban Main Kampf?
Have you ever even read it?
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.
Cool project, except these aren't really "banned" books. thats a misleading term. In most of these cases, the book isn’t actually banned. Nobody is being arrested for owning it, Amazon isn’t forbidden from selling it, and adults can still read it whenever they want.
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.
>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.
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"?
i agree, with a bit more nuance. it's one thing for a government agency staffed by educational professionals (like a public school district) to issue guidance (or even rules) on how libraries should be stocked -- but what's become widespread is legislative bodies bypassing those existing structures and issuing laws without input from educational professionals.
Words exist in a context. "User was banned from a site" and "Book is banned" have different connotations. You have to be purposely obtuse to conflate these.
just like how you can figure out when tom/dan say "we've banned this account" doesn't mean "banned this account from the internet", you can use similar context clues to figure out "banned book" doesn't mean "banned across the world and is now illegal".
I mean, when you're like "I have to make a hidden wifi server in a light bulb to distribute these books" that does kind of imply some dystopian totalitarian state that will put you to death for reading those books or something and not the reality that they are given their own highlighted section in literally every single bookstore in existence.
Did you read the article? The author doesn’t say anything like that.
It’s pretty clear this was mostly a fun idea with a bit of “could be useful in this scenario” motivation, which they mention came from reading a short story.
On my news feed today I saw a Newsweek story about how someone found a dvd of Birth of a Nation at Goodwill, not knowing what the plot was.
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.
I think of stuff like Luty who was challenged in the UK under the terrorism act for sharing books on improvised firearms, Ashley Dugan who was charged with "distributing explosives training to terrorists" and some of his youtube videos pulled for sharing the well known public domain synthesis of RDX explosives.
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.
The UK bans a lot more than the US does in terms of actual government bans on books and speech, especially under terrorism law.
The problem is that there isn’t really a better term, and using “banned” gives the correct impression for most people to see the problem.
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.
I find the trend of redefining or twisting terms to serve a specific cause really counterproductive. It eventually devalues the words themselves and makes nuanced discussion nearly impossible. If a problem is really that serious, it shouldn't require misleading language.
>I find the trend of redefining or twisting terms to serve a specific cause really counterproductive.
which term is being redefined?
In the context of supplying banned books in the software of a lightbulb, I expect banned to mean a China style ban where possession can get you punished. Not the (current) US version where certain taxpayer funded entities cannot provide the book.
But there might not be a better word for the latter scenario. Surely, few oppose libraries from “banning” pornographic books, so some level of discretion must be used by administrators.
> But there might not be a better word for the latter scenario.
How about age-gating?
From what I can find with a quick look, 'Banned' is most likely using PEN America[1]'s definition, which is “either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished.”
[1] Free speech non-profit mostly focused on literature.
Some that comes to mind: violence, -phobia, fascism, nazism, rape, genocide, supremacy, safety, political, diversity, man/woman.
In the context of this thread, it would be calling a book a "banned book" because it is banned in some school libraries, despite being widely available everywhere else. Akin to calling dogs a "banned pet" because they are banned from post offices. Technically correct but highly misleading without context.
This has been called book banning for a very long time. Banned Books Week has existed since 1982.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_Books_Week
I suspect that the same applies to most of the words that came to your mind; they're just being used in contexts you politically disagree with and therefore it's a "misuse". (Seinfeld's "soup nazi" was a misuse. Putin's use of the same word is a misuse. Descriptions of modern nationalist movements and the powers that support them are descriptive.)
There is a concept for pets called "banned breeds" (e.g., "pit bulls") that are similarly politically motivated in the same way that book banning happens.
But the problem is that with very few exception, it's not serious at all. Public libraries already make curation choices with politics in mind, school libraries already make curation choices with content moderation in mind, etc. In order to make it something approaching a real problem you have to invent potential laws that some states like Florida might make in the future.
This is admitting that its intentionally misleading, which is lying and is bad. You just think that it's an rhetorically effective term. When I walk into a public library and I see a display a books for "banned books week" that includes The Catcher in the Rye and The Color Purple, two of the most best selling books ever which are commonly assigned reading in schools, it's so obvious that the whole thing is a farce.
"banned" just means "not allowed".
it doesn't need to apply globally for something to be banned. it doesn't need to be illegal across the country. something can be banned from a certain place (e.g. a school). it's still correct to say it is banned.
some HNers are so weird when it comes to the word "banned" regarding books, i really dont understand why. its only ever in the context of school/library books. use "ban" in the sense of "banned from the forum" or similar, and no one bats an eye.
why dont people get worked up when tom/dang "ban" someone from HN? they haven't made it illegal for that user to visit HN.
Because they're not "not allowed". With very few exceptions the thing people are freaking out about is books being curated out of libraries, usually for very understandable reasons.
'Curated out' not by librarians but by a singular patron challenging the purchase of a certain publication.
If by "singular patron" you mean the administration of the school then I guess so.
>Because they're not "not allowed".
...yes? that is the meaning of "ban", so it seems entirely appropriate to use that word
It isn’t intentionally misleading, at best it is an over simplification of what is happening.
It is a fact that there is a government lead effort in various states to ban books from k-12 libraries. That part of this is not up for debate because it is happening. So they are in fact “banned”. As a society we generally accept that words have more complicated or nuanced meanings when connected to other words, as “banned” is in this case.
We also as a society generally accept that those other words may be implied or require looking at something for more than a minute to understand the context. If you are in a country where a book is actually banned, I would wager that you would likely just say “this book is banned” implying it is banned where you are instead of adding in “this book is banned here in X” since it would be unnecessary to say and would be generally understood.
If you don’t like the word than propose another word.
You may be overthinking this. "Banned" in this case means that the usual person or people who choose what books to include are being overridden by a party with more clout. From the perspective of a school librarian, for example, book X has been banned. They no longer have the option of including it. (This is even true in the case where the librarian would not have included it anyway, for their own reasons.) They are prevented by the school board, an angry mob of parents, the state legislature, the FBI, or whoever. The fact that the public library down the road carries the book does not change whether that librarian has the option of including it in their school library's collection. They can't. They are banned from including it.
The FBI is not telling school librarians to not stock copies of To Kill a Mockingbird. I really don't see the issue with local entities like a school board having some say in material that is available in a school. That can differ across the country, and thats fine. That's what our country is supposed to be like.
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.
You are missing the point. This makes it possible to distribute something that is actually banned. The included books are just examples.
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.
How is this different from banning alcohol or pets or weapons or any other thing? Whether or not you can buy and have at a different location doesn't mean the word is misleading.
Maybe something like "not library available" or "lending restricted"?
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.
Possessing a banned book has very serious weight in many circumstances:
https://legiscan.com/MS/text/HB1315/id/2767725
> (4) The Attorney General may investigate compliance with this section. The contracting party must report to the Attorney General a provider's failure to comply with subsection (2) of this section no later than thirty (30) days after the contracting party learns of the provider's noncompliance. Such a report shall constitute a public record under the Mississippi Public Records Act.
If these were actually banned books people would be a lot less enthusiastic about the endeavor. Pretty much every book that is genuinely banned, in that no publisher or printing house will print it and no bookstore will sell it, is either a racist diatribe, how to make bombs, or similar. These books on the other hand are books that one librarian or school admin somewhere in this vast country decided would no longer be included in their small library. Not very interesting.
Cool, dude, keep defending books with gay characters being banned in some libraries... I mean, not "curated". A "Ban" doesn't have to be universal for it to still be banned in one spot. A book banned in a Christian high school but available at a public library is still a "Banned book" because it has been banned somewhere.
If you're that bad with semantics, I'd recommend the next book you check out is the dictionary.
“As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth’s final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”
- Commissioner Pravin Lal, Datalinks
Alpha Centauri pertinent as ever.
We have abundant free flow of information today and yet I see a rise of tyranny.
"This is how democracy dies, with thunderous applause." feels more grounded in reality.
Peak free information flow was in 2010. When "social" media had its big break through, and nobody had learned how to control it yet. That time gave us the occupy movement, the Arab spring, and lots of hacktivism for the social good (mostly under the Anonymous umbrella).
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
I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss.
Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever screams at us the loudest. (from S2 Andor)
The loss of objectivity is one of the greatest losses. People who are online to want their trench to “win” are advocates for loss. People who abuse their position to only proclaim their side is the best, the all-knowing, the superior, or whatever the flavor is of the day, are advocates for loss.
And as we have seen, we are losing a lot by losing objectivity.
Yeah. I was saying "twitter gives you a revolution whether you need one or not". It's not automatic that the revolution will be progressive. And in the case of the Arab Spring, a liberal revolution gave rise to elections which brought in a much less liberal government, which is why the whole thing collapsed in short order.
But social media is also uniquely good at developing "negative polarization". Some of the counter movement was organic simply because people hated the progressive wins they saw.
> We have abundant free flow of information today and yet I see a rise of tyranny.
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.
We went from restricting the sharing of information to making information sharing unpopular.
If you ban or censor a book, you immediately make the book seem more valuable. Because governments aren't omnipotent and all restrictions can be overcome (see the war on drugs as a particularly recent and pertinent example), you just Streisand-effect yourself.
If, on the other hand, you take away the popularity and social status of those who read that book, branding them as gullible idiots in the popular imagination, people will have an aversion to reading it. You don't need to ban access to the book, in fact you shouldn't do that, just make sure that talking about it will get people to lose all their friends.
Social media are the modern arbiters of popularity. If social media bans a subject, people get angry. If it just quietly deboosts anybody who talks about that subject, "well let's better not do that, we tried and people really didn't like those videos I guess"
You pretty much described why I quit “social” media wholesale. It’s a turf war and nothing goods comes from it that cannot be got elsewhere at a vastly higher quality.
> If social media bans a subject, people get angry. If it just quietly deboosts anybody who talks about that subject, "well let's better not do that, we tried and people really didn't like those videos I guess"
Isn't this basically just a form of forced compliance ? I agree it's happening, but its happening because the ideas/information is not beneficial for the one who can control the distribution. Before anyone could post on usenet, add their own tinfoil hat blog if they wanted, but take the UK for now, if there is any discussion or interaction with people on your website, the government wants your ID and your users'. It's exhausting.
This is essentially how das kapital got discredited in the public consciousness.
If you browse any CS career forum though, at least 60% of the complaints about "the industry" happen in most capitalist industries and typically have one or more corresponding chapters in das kapital (e.g. one of the various forms of alienation, treadmill effect, capital accumulation, the creation of a reserve army of labour).
>there is more restriction than ever of the distribution of information
I don't think it sounds true. Pre-internet, information distribution required access to specific technical tools, and physical transportation efforts. As one of USSR dissidents noted, risks of distribution grew almost exponentially with amount of pages (and it's about imprisonment, not account deletion). For comparison, emailing so far works even in very repressive countries. And even narrowing the issue to the West, while free speech suffered a lot recently, shadowbanned account is probably still works better than hectograph.
> there is more restriction than ever of the distribution of information.
There's an endless source of information if you look for it. Just because social media doesn't stuff them in your face doesn't mean they're censored.
On the other hand, you can shove proof in people's faces and they'll still find reasons to argue against it. Information availability is not the problem. It's more energy consuming to search and filter information so people largely avoid doing it.
There's a trope in movies where the antagonist is secretly recorded and broadcast so regular people finally see the truth and wake up. I've seen journalists risking their carriers to expose corruption only for people to shrug and look the other way.
Do we, or are a lot of people who may or may not be on the side of tyranny doing a lot of work to control how the information actually flows.
Not entirely true. Many science is gatekeeped, as well as other types of information. May books require illegal services to be obtained, or money (when available). Information about facts is buried in a lot of misinformation. Free flow is very hard to obtain!
We have peak flow of propaganda and disinformation to a cartoonish level.
Unfortunately we do not have a solution for countering this kind of a 'denial of service' attack on information consumption.
It is trivial to concoct believable lies as compared to the effort needed to debunk them in a way that is effective at social scale.
Perhaps the only weapon is to teach how to think for oneself. Who is going to invest in that in a scale necessary? Those who have the resources to do that do not have sufficient motivation. Often the motivation to do the opposite is stronger.
> we do not have a solution for countering this kind of a 'denial of service' attack
Umm, wouldn't a simple solution be going back to linear news feed that only includes updates from people you follow rather than the algorithm deciding what content to push to you?
We have the solution.
Indeed. And with AI and video generation, it's now (or within months) literally undetectable. The closer we get to US midterms, the more we'll see how bad it really can get this time around.
And the US elections in 2028? I can barely imagine.
And the massive problem is, most people I talk to still think what they see on youtube is real. But of course, people thought the TV show Survivor was real, too. It's not a new phenomenon.
But it is at crazy levels. I like your 'denial of service' designation, because even knowing the problem, maybe you can't find real info still.
While true, i don’t see how you can have one without the other.
“Fighting disinformation” is the banner under which free flow is necessarily interrupted.
Yes and no I think. If you analyse it, the censors will work to actually block channels where the truth can be shared. What's left over time is only the government sanctioned media, which over time becomes more and more corrupt with disinformation. So I think I agree with your second sentence but not your first, in that if we didn't pretend to fight disinformation, I think we wouldn't have so much of it.
queue Nina Janowicz at the piano
We don't. Search engines return a limited number of results from "trusted media" and dissident opinion, whether balanced or batshit crazy, is all lumped together as misinformation and conspiracy theory.
Search engines return a trove of SEO-optimized generated garbage. Search engines do not apply labels such as misinformation or conspiracy theory.
Try finding anything objective on the Ukraine war and you will find to have a constant narrative shoved down your throat
Actually they or at least social media does or used to do, peaking during the panny-d and dismantling the 'fake news' checks and balances during Trump II.
In Italy a left wing writer and historian declared publicly he was going to vote a certain way on a referendum and facebook flagged it as "fake news"… how could it be fake news if it was clearly just his own opinion and intent on what to do.
Get off my land, you peacekeeping son-of-a-bitch!
Best 4x game of all time. The 2060 that game envisioned seems closer everyday.
Is it really a safeguard?
GREATEST strategy and philosophical game I have witnessed in the past 30 years...
Peak of complexity and maturism in games...
I wish they would release a remastered version of the game with updated graphics and movies, with nothing else changed. The game mechanics were great. Beyond Earth was not good in comparison.
As a child I never liked the AI's strategy to plop cities down right next to each other. I should see if I can understand that as an adult. If I was designing a remake/remaster it wouldn't even have updated graphics just change the AI.
BE was so bland. Both in design and in terms of gameplay. Terrain affected like nothing.
I found the strat to go was to spam Scouts for resources, then get that upgrade that gave you Science per deal and spam every cheap deal as soon as you can.
"Already we have turned all of our critical industries... over to these... things... these lumps of silver and paste we call nanorobots. And now we propose to teach them intelligence? What, pray tell, will we do when these little homunculi awaken one day and announce that they have no further need of us?"
Sister Miriam Godwinson, We Must Dissent
This game and its ideas are so timeless.
The "information wants to be free" discourse of just under 30 years ago feels so charmingly naive now that we've seen how lies are also information and can travel even better using the same flow.
And who shall we appoint at the supreme arbitrator of what is lie and what is knowledge?
Some of us remember when they assured us that the novel virus in china was not to be afraid of.
And it wasn't, until it was. Before Covid-19 we had SARS and MERS, both of which were also watched closely but those didn't develop into a pandemic.
Some of us remember when they assured us ivermectin could cure it.
And hydroxychloroquine before that.
> And who shall we appoint at the supreme arbitrator of what is lie and what is knowledge?
Ask the parents of the Sandy Hook children, they'll tell you.
Truly something we still have to figure out. Attention budget is real and things can get buried. The really big problem of our time.
What exactly is this "information wants to be free" discourse? The arguments for and against freedom of speech as a foundational social principle span at least 300 continuous years.
popular refrain around the "Free Kevin" era ca. 1999 or so. See also "Boycott RIAA" etc.
I shared its optimism and naivete :-(
> What exactly is this "information wants to be free" discourse?
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.
The discussions about intellectual property rights are quite recent, but the idea that "lies are also information and can travel even better using the same flow" was well-explored over 300 years of discussions about freedom of speech (and not only discussions, but also jailings, executions, witch hunts, etc).
I think it should be pretty obvious that dissemination of information and lies today—when you can’t even know if the person on the other side is real or from your own country—is much different than 300 years ago. The “information wants to be free” motivation is much closer to the world of today than the one in your distant past.
More importantly, I don’t understand why you’re so hung up on that. What difference does it make? If you agree with the conclusion, why are the dates of when the idea started so important? It doesn’t matter to the discussion, it’s only distracting from the point.
> I think it should be pretty obvious that dissemination of information and lies today much different than 300 years ago.
Of course, so what? If your implication is that none of the arguments made over 300 years are relevant today, I would say it is pretty obviously completely wrong.
> when you can’t even know if the person on the other side is real or from your own country
Did people in England and France use to know the authors of seditious pamphlets that were produced in the Dutch Republic and smuggled into those countries? Most of them were anonymous. Not only they didn't know the authors, the authors 100% were enabled by foreign actors.
> it’s only distracting from the point
The point: we've seen recently how damaging the fast spread of lies is therefore only naive fools would be against information control. My rebuttal: we've seen how damaging lies are for 300 years, yet it is a deep ongoing debate that many great thinkers contributed to, therefore it is not just a matter of fools believing into something.
Or do you see "the point" to be something different?
> If your implication is that none of the arguments made over 300 years are relevant today
No, the point is that for the purposes of this discussion it is irrelevant when the arguments were first made. And reread the original:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48550066
Nowhere does it say that “information wants to be free” was the originator of the idea. It’s merely anchoring it to something recent HN readers have a good likelihood of being acquainted with. It’s like someone used Avatar to discuss how colonialism is portrayed in media, and someone came along to say “Pocahontas did it way before”. Alright, but that doesn’t matter for the argument. We’re discussing the idea itself, its origins do not make a difference for the matter.
I’ll ask again:
> If you agree with the conclusion, why are the dates of when the idea started so important?
> No, the point is that for the purposes of this discussion it is irrelevant when the arguments were first made.
How is that irrelevant if the whole statement is literally about when the arguments were first made and supposedly disproven?
> Nowhere does it say that “information wants to be free” was the originator of the idea.
It literally says __now__ that we've seen how lies are also information and can travel even better using the same flow, as if it is something recent.
> It’s like someone used Avatar to discuss how colonialism is portrayed in media, and someone came along to say “Pocahontas did it way before”. Alright, but that doesn’t matter for the argument. We’re discussing the idea itself, its origins do not make a difference for the matter.
If someone says that our views on colonialism were naive before Avatar 2 changed our perception of Avatar, of course it is fair to mention Pocahontas and 300 years of nuanced discussions of colonialism.
Why do you assuming only true information is information. Information can be anything not to mention that the definition of truths and lies can change with time and location.
My point is that in the late '90s that was the prevailing assumption about the growth of the internet. We have learned that this assumption was wrong.
> the definition of truths and lies can change with time and location
This is moral relativism.
Years ago there was PirateBox: flash a small Wifi access point with a custom firmware that's a webserver that hosts a forum/filehost. Their website is dead, but here's a mod of the project; https://www.jasongriffey.net/librarybox/
Although, I dread to think what sort of files one would get when user uploads are allowed.
I built a PirateBox with an old Asus access point once. It was a bit of a dissapointing experience. Mostly because people were scared to access an open wifi point. Plus it did not 'give one free internet' so people usually immediately disconnected. Unfortunately the Library Box mod is also no longer an active project.
I had the same experience. I ran it on the original Pi zero with a WiFi dongle, in the middle of a busy town. Not a single interaction.
A hidden “book server” like this could be set up in just about any electronic device with a sufficiently powerful microcontroller. But I think there is something delightfully poetic about using a source of light to spread suppressed knowledge.
I have seen these described as Pirate Boxes before, way back around 2012. The basic idea is a box that throws up a wifi network and web server letting people upload/download files to it, while remaining disconnected from the wider internet. A geographically limited digital sharing library.
Android loves to auto-disconnect you from any Wifi network that doesn't provide Internet. You need to go through a bunch of arcane settings to disable that feature.
Settings, Network and Internet, Adaptive Connectivity - if anyone’s looking for it.
Thanks a ton. Now I know why connection to my camera's wifi access point drops on my Android and what to do about it. Thanks a ton!
Also a thing to consider for some digital audio mixers. Many can broadcast an AP for use with a tablet/pc for app-control. No way in hell I'm connecting my mixer to the internet during a show! The last thing I need is some script kiddy DDoS'ing the mixer and crashing my console.
You can spoof internet by responding to http gets on any IP. Last I checked phones didn’t require a valid https certificate as part of their portal detection.
This was my thought as well. I think the workaround is to have the device present itself as a captive portal type of thing, like you might encounter at a Starbucks, so that when the user is prompted to "Sign In" they immediately find the dead drop.
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.
That's exactly what this project attempts to do. It acts as a captive portal.
Oh, excellent. I didn't catch that in the portions I skimmed.
Wifi Pineapples have a lot of codebase which can be used / reworked to do something like this, throwing up a captive portal on a web server.
Makes me wonder if credential harvesting is a thing when all these smart bulbs and other IoT devices get thrown away with the Wi-Fi credentials stored on them.
For someone so mindful of efficient software and use of energy, it's showing that images on that post are 5MB PNGs...
if anyone's writing a script with a nerd in it, this line would kill
I'd like to see a show with this kind of writing
Mr. Robot had that kind of writing (at least in the first season which is the only one I watched).
I watched the whole thing, and I think it sort of went off the rails over time, probably to keep upping the ante. I think you're fine just watching the first season
Nice, but:
"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.
I think the point was that it's difficult to notice in the first place, not that it would be hard to find once you know you're looking for something. You don't have a black WiFi router with antennae dangling down from the ceiling.
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?
Just walk around with a Wi-Fi analyzer on your phone, playing hotter/colder until you 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.
So many objects have their own networks now. With a clever SSID and placement in a room full of potential targets, it could be pretty tough for someone to narrow it down to the bulb.
while true i think it's extremely unlikely to be suspicious of a light bulb. especially if it doesn't seem out of place, like if it's on a light socket why think that it's an wifi access point?
New device design: battery backup for the computer, light still operates based on external power.
This would be a massive improvement. I wonder what the largest battery you could fit in would be.
I'd be interested in the banned book list. A glance at the socials with the biggest one missing suggests there will be no interesting books on it. Just the ones you can find in "banned books" stands at mainstream bookstores. Absolute mediocrity of thought free of meaningful diversity.
It's here: https://codeberg.org/rickoooooo/BannedBookLibrary/src/branch...
For the curious, the "banned" books are (it's a short list):
Stunning and brave.> This firmware comes pre-loaded with several books that are out of copyright and in the public domain, as an example.
These are just public domain books provided as examples. You can put whatever you want on it.
Per the article, the bulb only had 4 MB storage and the idea is that each bulb's library would be a reflection of its creator. So there is no one list. Put whatever you want on it.
Nice example how far you can come with little initial knowledge, a clear goal, some passion and an inquisitive mind.
Really cool project!
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.
That's exactly what this project is. You can buy the same tasmota bulb I used and flash it over the wifi. No disassembly required.
Great rabbit hole but the flaw is the bulb might not be obvious but the book would be on a network scan someone suspected electronic dead drops.
But it is so spatially limited, only accessible within the wifi range of the bulb, it would be pretty challenging to thoroughly root these out from across a city or region.
A thumb drive would be even harder but more obvious in its purpose. The bulb is good because it hides in plain sight. But it requires being within sight to be meaningful. But once it is it’ll be broadcasting its existence over standard protocols.
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.
I can see using this as a form of "geo-caching."
This project and especially one of the closing notes[1] reminds me of a more mature DIY project to make a mesh node using a simple solar lamp[2]. I love the creativity on display here and I especially appreciate all the links to the other blogs and sites that helped you along the way.
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-...
Data transfer is so, so extremely limited over Meshtastic it probably wouldn't be worth it for anything larger than a few dozen kB. There are a lot of documents and books that could fit into such a small size perhaps but no novels.
So you're the one who can recreate Apollo mission computer :D
oh this is awesome, i've always thought it could be cool to leave always connect hubs around town. ESP32's would be to awkward but a bunch of lightbulbs would blend right in!
Reads like you had fun, keep up the hacking!
P.S main -> mail I think?
sorry specifically this line > The bulbs showed up in the main a few days later
Such a satisfying read, really enjoyed this, especially since your skills are definitely beyond mine. The mesh network idea would be incredibly cool!
And it's even better that it's for a good cause as well.
Anyone looking for local-first smart bulbs, plugs, etc with Tasmota or ESPHome I can thoroughly recommend https://www.mylocalbytes.com/ - not affiliated in any way, just a very happy customer.
You people never disapoint... Putting a web server in a light bulb, I mean who the hell even thinks of that?!
Tasmota on ESP devices have a web server by default for administration.
As expected, the book examples given were not "banned".
They're usually school libraries that are removing books from their collection that contain explicit material, usually at the request of parents.
Almost the entire article is about turning a light bulb into a Wi-Fi hotspot/web server, and your takeaway was, well actually, _The Color Purple_ is not technically banned.
Unless I missed something I only spotted two book examples since that wasn't the focus of the article.
It's just tech enthusiasts being socially inept. There is literally no discourse to be had from this comment, infact it only serves to detract from the main point of the article
It is the fact that this tool would only be providing minors with these "banned books" that shows a lack of social awareness.
It is the choice of the individual to base their project around these "banned books", which invites this discourse.
“Banned books” is just a safe term to use for something whose real purpose would be to facilitate sharing warez, snuff films, child porn, whistleblowing… etc. Get a grip.
It's a needed comment since the first word in the title is 'Banned' and in typical online discourse the comments go down-hill into a rant against ideology/politics.
What is your definition of banned then?
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.
Which is understandable, but only to a point - the problem was that a lot of banned books were also frequently anti-establishment or critical of the regime.
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.
The cynical side of me wonders if some books might be "banned" on purpose to have the distinction of being a banned book. Probably few books are actually that way, but these days it seems like a shortcut to notoriety
It definitely gets used as a tool to get attention, but let’s be real, nobody is getting rich selling cheap paperbacks in 2026. If you’ve ever been around a school district targeted by the moms for liberty or whatever, it’s a very real thing.
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.
To be fair to the folks playing metal backwards, some 80s bands did include backward encoded messages about satan. It was likely publicity stunts to rile people up though. Include something controversial for marketing.
That seems unlikely.
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" :-)
So the books are being banned from being in that library? "removing books" and "banning a book in a library" is equivalent.
> As expected, the book examples given were not "banned".
> 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.
By your logic any book in existence can be banned at any point in time. It's a meaningless designation.
By your logic, no modern book in existence is banned. The books are always available somewhere.
"Banned" isn't generally universally applied. It may just be banned in the OPs libraries. Or maybe these are simply commonly banned books.
Never say a "red apple" then because lord knows it had been green at some point! It's a meaningless designation.
Whenever I hear about "banned books" they're usually so banned that Barnes & Noble has a prominent "banned books" display selling them at the store entrance. It's all marketing.
quite interesting to find hackable hardware in commodity looking smart devices.
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.
I'm guessing the website is currently being hugged to death, but the images take a while to load, and I'm on a pretty good connection. Maybe try webp with some decent compression to shrink down the filesize?
Thanks, I've updated the post to use webp images, which did help a ton.
I would suspect that the brown potting stuff, among other things, conducts heat away from the components.
It'd be great to set this up to return files over Reticulum or another decentralized mesh protocol, so it doesn't rely on the Internet in any way.
I love this idea, thank you for posting it. It can be used for so many interesting projects.
I do hope you'll extend you work by making the lamp broacast the book by using light morse code
Fahrenheit 451 anyone?
I suppose the bulb could get hot enough to burn the media storing the books.
Whatever this is, Tasmota is not the solution.
Has anyone heard of similar work done with smart light bulbs but for Meshtastic nodes?
Why would you put a LoRa radio in consumer-grade household electronics?
LoRa is also sub-optimal for payloads more than a few K in size and most ePub files are at least a meg...
Meshtastic / meshcore at this point look like a dead end of the development.
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 think calling them "banned" is so disingenuous. There are actual banned books that are illegal to own in the United States. None of these "banned books" come anywhere close to meeting that criteria.
Very cool project nonetheless!
Actual banned books that are illegal to own? Such as?
Zero books are banned by name in the USA. Certain content is: Classified documents (although this is just illegal to share as the one with the original clearance, not to publish/read/possess after), child abuse material, and copyright violations all come to mind.
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_...
Yeah, I just disagree with the terminology of calling something "banned", which makes it seem a lot more dire than it is. Local book curation at a school-district level doesn't seem newsworthy to me, which is what the whole "banned books" term seems to stem from.
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.
In 2021 the company that holds the rights to Dr. Seuss books, founded by his family after his death, announced that they would stop printing several of his books because they judged them to be racist against nonwhites: https://apnews.com/article/dr-seuss-books-racist-images-d8ed... . This isn't a government ban on the content of the books, but rather the legitimate copyright owner refusing to print them for their own ideological reasons.
Once the books go out of copyright they will no longer be able to legally prevent anyone else from printing the books, and copyright law doesn't prevent people from legally reselling their already-purchased copies of books. But if you go onto Amazon right now and look at prices, you'll find that a copy of one of the Dr. Seuss books that the rights-holder refuses to print more copies of, such as McElligot's Pool, costs over 100 dollars; whereas a Dr. Seuss book that the rights-holders haven't judged as racist, such as The Cat in the Hat, costs about $5.
I'm not really sure how this is exactly pertinent to a discussion on books being banned. A copyright holder can choose to cease publication for any reason, that's categorically different than a ban. Perhaps it's a point in a broader argument about copyright.
There must be some book with actually banned content in it, right? Especially copyright violations. They could include a PDF of some Linux source code but with MIT license.
Edit: per the other comment's Wikipedia link, the unredacted Operation Dark Heart seems banned in the US because it included classified info
There is a book called "60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye" which is (was?) banned in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_David_California
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.
Every book is banned by that line of reasoning, if you're distributing it without license. And every movie and every song.
Some stuff is public domain, though!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_govern...
There are other countries outside of United States. And the book curation is up to the user.
It is not disingenuous, maybe a little loose on the 'meaning', but your definition is rather narrow. The Color Purple has been challenged many times in order to be removed from public library circulation and public school curriculums. Annie on my Mind was banned from the Kansas Public School system and subject to book burnings at the federal courthouse. The removal of the book (ban?) was overturned by the court. There are many similar examples of this on banned book lists. Colloquially, the term 'banned' is used often to encompass books that are actually banned, challenged, or illegally removed from public spaces due to a group actively censoring literature for various reasons. I think that general use is fine rather than being pedantic about it considering the social and intellectual costs involved. To call a book that is removed from circulation illegally not banned because there is no law banning it is foolish, since that is a reoccurring tactic among groups applying censorship on communities.
It's rather subjective, though, no?
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.
It is subjective. I believe the application or suggestion here is if you are in a community that denies people under 18 the right to have access to certain books over philosophical differences, you can create a book server and give them access to books. If you live in a state, or institution in your example, that will legally punish you or worse for selling or owning a book, you can create a book server. The two are not different really, the systems/people that are limiting the access to literature and information through varying means of enforcement are trying to achieve the same ends, state enforced censorship and control.
In the article example, to deny this because of a technically or the degree of legal enforcement is foolish since it is rebelling against the act of banning books, the process of banning, which doesn't occur out of thin air, it is an evolution of acts. It is not an absolute and one doesn't have to wait until there is a legally defined ban to start the protest. That would be ridiculous as it would be too late.
I don't think the project is trying to make the Banned Library of Congress either, anyone could put whatever books they want on their server. It is suggesting civil disobedience by circumventing oppression through censorship with creativity, which is awesome.
I'm all for civil disobedience, but that's just it. "Civil Disobedience in a Light Bulb" would have been a better angle.
> It is not disingenuous, maybe a little loose on the 'meaning', but your definition is rather narrow
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
Why stop there? While meshtastic would require additional hardware, tor entry exit nodes would not. Nor would other mesh protocols… also as for hosting ideas… the text files? Def cad and related models… skies the limit with space the only limiting factor.
Well written. That it was written at all is a strong comment on the state of our world where we have an improbable amount of data, but nothing to read.
I'm surprised there are banned books with 1st amendment exists in America? I'm curious as to what these are. I think its rather silly that books can be banned.
Whenever I encounter some news article regarding “banned” books I dig a little deeper and typically discover that some library or elementary school simply put an age restriction on those titles.
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.
There might not currently be but that hasn't always been the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_in_Boston and the obscenity laws are still in place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Diana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity_Prosecution_Task_For...
You would be correct there are no "banned books" in America.
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.
Each state is part of the USA, and each state DOES ban some books.
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.
> USA is ultra conservative on the average in comparison to just any European state for example.
Are you serious? The UK and Germany are arresting people for social media posts. That is actual impingement of free speech.
None of those books are banned.
Relying on the ultra mainstream wikipedia for a banned book would be hilarious if it weren't so deeply disappointing. They'll list nothing interesting.
The point is that those books aren't actually banned for general access. They may not be present in a school library, but you can certainly get them on Amazon.
There's a certain amount of censorship of classified information published by (ex-)military, and that kind of thing, but it can be and is challenged in court.
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.
Jordan Derrick (Ashley Dugan) recently had a youtube video on making RDX pulled and criminally charged with "distribution of explosives information to terrorists" for publicly sharing the public domain patented/documented synthesis (going back to a German patent all the way in the 19th century IIRC) of RDX explosives and denied bail for "hate speech" of using the Israeli flag as a doormat (which was actually in the indictment).
It's not different than McDonald's and Burger King being banned in Germany.
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.
have you you checked out "esp32-s3" which costs $7.12 and has wifi and microsd installed on it [0]. Also esp32-cam is another board with similar specifications.
[0] https://www.seeedstudio.com/XIAO-ESP32S3-p-5627.html
You should add guest-logbook as in 90" and 00" to it :) Or whole fucking BBS system :) THAT would be cool
In the USA, the books that are banned are for public schools. They talk about topics like (gasp) LGBTQ and sex things!
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.
>In the USA, the books that are banned are for public schools. They talk about topics like (gasp) LGBTQ and sex things!
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.
Are we talking about this?
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.)
NoMoreNicksLeft conveniently left out the (singular!) banned book they were referring to. I believe that was by intent, to make the strawman unassailable.
And its easy to attack books in k-12 school libraries. The hard conservative christians attack DEI, sexuality, suicide, witchcraft, and other things regularly.
However, we are also seeing direct attacks on funding with public libraries.
https://michiganadvance.com/2025/06/23/local-michigan-librar...
They almost had their funding yanked to keep librarians from putting LGBTQ books on the shelves. These christian nationalists would rather destroy public libraries than allow (gasp!) books on subjects they dont like.
And as far as I can tell, the solution as of May 21 2026, was that the 4 republicans on the board voted to segregate all the aforementioned topics to the adult section. They also voted to remove the ALA's Library Bill of Rights. And who is this "They" who rewote it? "Alliance Defending Freedom", a christian nationalist group known for LGBTQ hatred.
https://thelivingstonpost.com/guest-column-cromaines-mass-re...
And all of this shit is in the name of children and "harmful to minors". (Geeee, where have we seen this using children for terrible shit before? Perhaps age verification?)
Im not always for democrats, as many of them are statist stooges as well. But book banning and threatening to shut down libraries is well within fascist and nazi regimes.
https://archive.org/details/gender-queer-a-memoir-by-maia-ko...
Your one page shocker doesnt address anything I said. It just shows how sexually backwards you want older children and young adults to be.
From Wikipedia the book is intended for 12-18, or a better description, someone who is going through or has gone through puberty. This is the same age where children start to learn themselves and others as a sexual beings we are. And in Judaism, a 12 year old IS an adult, religiously speaking. Bar|Bat mitzvah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Queer:_A_Memoir
And even in the US across most (all?) states, a 16 year old can legally have sex. Pictures however are "child porn" or csam, for fuck-if-i-know reason. But sex? 100% legal.
And again, *pretending* this doesnt exist, or hiding or destroying this knowledge is NEVER a good solution. Adolescents are going to get knowledge. Id rather them get the correct knowledge, rather than slop, misinformation, or worse. And its even harder for LGBTQ folks. So much hate (by people like you) have been aimed at us. We've got a tough path. We would rather accurate descriptions be shown, rather than shit like Chick Tracts.
But ive dealt with people like yourself who use shame and disgust when talking about sex. Ive also seen where that leads, and how utterly backwards and ignorant those adult children are. And that ignorance of sex is actually more dangerous than 'harming' their sensibilities.
Thats how you get rape and sexual assault, by not talking of consent. Thats how you get pregnancy, by not talking how sperm and eggs work. Thats how you get STDs, by not discussing sexual diseases and how to protect yourself from them.
At one job I worked at (food service), had a 19 year old woman think if she had sex standing up, the semen would run out of her vagina and she wouldnt get pregnant. 2 months later, she was pregnant.
Another job in food service I worked at hired a 18 year old lady who was heavily indoctrinated by extremist christian home schooling. She didnt even know the definition or how sex worked. Her parents kept it from her. She ended up asking her coworkers on breaks what it was about. We all recognized the severe harm done to her, and tried to help where we could. Questions she asked that we couldnt answer, we directed her to the public library. (These days, the cristian nationalist trash types dont even want that to be an avenue.)
The underlying theme with your comments and invoking shame points that you support the utterly failed approach of abstinence only education. Everywhere its tried is an abject failure. https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/abstinence-only-e...
And Id say that you are harming your children more by arbitrary abstinence, than by actual education. Shocker image or no.
Nice strawman you constructed. However, it was burning the moment you put it together.
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.
https://archive.org/details/gender-queer-a-memoir-by-maia-ko...
Some books deserve to be banned.
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 actually a very interesting lecture for any critical mind, like also The Holy Bible is a very interesting lecture for any atheist.
"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.
If I, as a person who is firmly opposed to racism, wishes to read the Turner Diaries, why shouldn’t I be allowed to? Do you really think some stupid book by some racist wackjob is going to sway my deepest values? Can you not imagine a legitimate reason why I would want to read such a book? For example, to see what these people are thinking so I can be better prepared to answer their arguments if I’m ever forced to argue with one?
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.
Why would you ban Main Kampf? Have you ever even read it?
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.
Some people categorically oppose the death penalty, others oppose the death penalty “except when it’s justified”.
I guess when it comes to Freedom of Speech, you fall into the latter category.