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Posted by sohkamyung 20 hours ago

Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb(www.richardosgood.com)
545 points | 324 commentspage 2
MeteorMarc 8 hours ago|
Nice example how far you can come with little initial knowledge, a clear goal, some passion and an inquisitive mind.
hungryhobbit 20 hours ago||
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.

rickoooooo 17 hours ago|
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.
fnordpiglet 12 hours ago||
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.
Schlagbohrer 12 hours ago|
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.
fnordpiglet 3 hours ago||
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.

okeuro49 9 hours ago||
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.

aarond0623 8 hours ago||
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.

BeepyJoop 7 hours ago|||
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
okeuro49 5 hours ago||
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.

deadbabe 3 hours ago||
“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.
mlrtime 8 hours ago|||
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.
goda90 7 hours ago|||
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.

Cthulhu_ 6 hours ago|||
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.

littlecorner 7 hours ago|||
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
Spooky23 7 hours ago|||
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.

cpburns2009 6 hours ago||
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.
gspr 6 hours ago|||
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" :-)

gspr 7 hours ago|||
> 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.

Argonaut998 5 hours ago||
By your logic any book in existence can be banned at any point in time. It's a meaningless designation.
cogman10 5 hours ago|||
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.

miltonlost 5 hours ago|||
Never say a "red apple" then because lord knows it had been green at some point! It's a meaningless designation.
miltonlost 5 hours ago|||
So the books are being banned from being in that library? "removing books" and "banning a book in a library" is equivalent.
cpburns2009 6 hours ago||
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.
samtheDamned 19 hours ago||
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-...

Schlagbohrer 12 hours ago|
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.
lanycrost 5 hours ago||
So you're the one who can recreate Apollo mission computer :D
geoffwarner 2 hours ago||
I can see using this as a form of "geo-caching."
ipkstef 20 hours ago||
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?

ipkstef 20 hours ago|
sorry specifically this line > The bulbs showed up in the main a few days later
xp84 13 hours ago|
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.

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