Reads like you had fun, keep up the hacking!
P.S main -> mail I think?
Very cool project nonetheless!
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_...
Although, I dread to think what sort of files one would get when user uploads are allowed.
1: > I was talking with a friend about this idea and the storage limitation and he thought it would be cool to have these devices form a mesh network
2: https://meshtastic.org/docs/community/enclosures/rak/harbor-...
What follows is not a critique of the author, for he or she is likely immersed in the same "banned books" media psyop as other Western News Consoomers.
As of this reply, the "banned" books in question [0] are:
Jack_London_-_Call_of_the_Wild.epub
Mark_Twain_-_Adventures_of_Huckleberry_Finn.epub
Mark_Twain_-_The_Adventures_of_Tom_Sawyer.epub
Women_in_Love_-_D_H_Lawrence.epub
These books are all available on Amazon for under $10. Further, they are often assigned reading in high school or university literature classes.
A thought experiment by comparison: what if the collection consisted of the following?
- The Camp of the Saints
- Culture of Critique
- The Turner Diaries
Until a recent reprint of the first title (which thanks to The Streisand Effect was one of the top sellers on Amazon), these were all almost impossible to find and / or prohibitively expensive. Note that I don't necessarily agree with the subject matter of these titles, just pointing out collective blindspots so we the people can avoid actual Bans in the not too distant future.
0: https://codeberg.org/rickoooooo/BannedBookLibrary/src/branch...
It's been a while since I used the github gist 'download zip' functionality. Quite handy.
There are equivalent books in our own time, and using those instead would make the project feel more like an actual defense of Free Speech and less like a quip of “goodness gracious, people were prudes in the 1920s”, which everyone already agrees with.
"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.
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.
LoRa is also sub-optimal for payloads more than a few K in size and most ePub files are at least a meg...
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.
- Commissioner Pravin Lal, Datalinks
Alpha Centauri pertinent as ever.
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.
A library can choose what books they stock (especially a school library. Of course they're highly curated.). You don't have to agree with their choices, but the book isn't banned. You can still find it at a county library, an ebook library, or on the Internet.
So it's a bit dramatic to say "I'm fighting the system by hosting banned books!", just because some Tennessee elementary schoolers can't check it out from their school library. Just feels like a joke and a mockery when there's governments that genuinely censor books.
Edit: per the other comment's Wikipedia link, the unredacted Operation Dark Heart seems banned in the US.
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
But that’s a good ban of course, because Freedom of Speech only matters when it concerns speech I agree with.
all 4 of the books that are checked-in to that repo are old enough that they're in the public domain. I looked at Call of the Wild and it has a title page saying it came from Project Gutenberg, I assume the other 3 likely did too.
rather than jumping to conclusions about the author being influenced by a "psyop" I think there's a much simpler and more boring explanation - they didn't want to check copyrighted ebooks into a publicly-accessible Codeberg repo.
hungryhobbit•2h ago
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.