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>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"?

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.

You are missing the point. This makes it possible to distribute something that is actually banned.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Is it really a safeguard?

Get off my land, you peacekeeping son-of-a-bitch!

Best 4x game of all time. The 2060 that game envisioned seems closer everyday.

GREATEST strategy and philosophical game I have witnessed in the past 30 years...

Peak of complexity and maturism in games...

"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.

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.

Settings, Network and Internet, Adaptive Connectivity - if anyone’s looking for it.

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.

if anyone's writing a script with a nerd in it, this line would kill

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.

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.

It's here: https://codeberg.org/rickoooooo/BannedBookLibrary/src/branch...

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.

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.

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.

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.

sorry specifically this line > The bulbs showed up in the main a few days later

Tasmota on ESP devices have a web server by default for administration.

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.

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

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.

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.

Thanks, I've updated the post to use webp images, which did help a ton.

I suppose the bulb could get hot enough to burn the media storing the books.

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.

Actual banned books that are illegal to own? Such as?

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

"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.