It is strange to me that people obsess on programming in-game with "red stone" etc. That said I am dayjob programmer so the last thing I want to do on my free time and is to program stuff.
I made a game that uses the Luanti "voxel" engine (MC-likes games of course, but also transposition of other genres), and even programming that is bit of a chore but that's the price to pay to play the game you want to play (there's much more to that than just programming/modding; game design is a rabbit hole).
But I think that it would be more rewarding for those who are curious about programming to start modding, especially in Luanti because it is relatively well documented and it's Lua. In a way, making it rain with the programmable particle spawner the engine provides is a loot box locked by an API, with hints on how to open it in the docs ;-)
Game design is the ultimate lockbox - you're unlocking an entire imaginary world which has some platonic existance in your mind.
And since you mentioned Luanti, it deserves to be much better known as a credible open alternative to Minecraft. You could do a lot worse then designing/prototyping your game with Luanti as the game engine.
I think it is the fun of working towards simple goals, in a restricticed visual environment, in a gamified way.
The challenge is the restriction. Starting with and and or gates while at work you would be writing CRUD
Tl:dr; It was a release file for their Minecon event. It was never meant to be public. Obsessing over a password protected in a company's S3 bucket is weird and crosses many limits.
> Telling people they should not try and crack something is kind of like the Streisand effect.
More like a reverse-streisand effect. They were honest about the contents of the file, it was Minecraft 1.0 and not interesting, but the community didn't accept the explanation.
I disagree with this and what Dinnerbone says about locks. It doesn’t matter who file was intended for, it’s on the internet, if people want to use their silicon to do some mathematics to turn some numbers into some other numbers that’s their choice. It’s not equivalent to breaking into a house.
I agree it's not the equivalent, but the file could've contained things like Minecon attendees. That would still mean it's badly secured of course, but putting a huge community effort behind it and youtubers making 'Biggest Secret in Minecraft' videos about it would suddenly turn into very bad taste.
I personally don't see downloadability as a significant factor in the morality of breaching security. If it's bad to hack a login screen to gain access to private information, why wouldn't it be bad to hack encryption to do the same thing? What moral dimension does downloadability alter?
I think the house analogy fails because you cannot duplicate a house, take it somewhere else, and attempt to break into it there. If you could, that would undoubtedly be seen as a violation.
It is rather common in gaming to communities to find people completely obessed over ultra specific details of their favorite game. It isn't even the first time for Minecraft, see the "pack.png" case.
Weird. The file was cracked in May 2024, while the password had appeared in a database leak which was added in HIBP (and thus pretty much public) back in October 2017.
Unsure why it took the community so long to crack the file.
>He mentioned that he does not want people to nag him about it and that “It's brought up every single year, I'm hoping this is the last ”. Finally putting an end to a 13 year old mystery.
I see you haven’t stumbled across the Minecraft community much, because this weirdness is just every day for them.
Take for example, the infamous 2B2T Minecraft server.
Exploits and game breaking mechanics by virtually impossible to discover bugs, and the no rule against hacking and cheating, have led to things people didn’t think were even possible in Minecraft over the servers ~15 year history.
It's similar in format to communities that obssess over "lost media." The inability to pirate or get access to something becomes an obsession. Even if the piece of media exists in an archive somewhere, that doesn't matter to them because it's about the fact that they themselves don't have access to it that has become the obsession.
There's also the piracy communities where a majority of users believe they have some sort of inherent right to watch something merely because it exists. I don't understand where that sentiment comes from.
Not only are you being disingenous by generalizing to "anything that exists" (when for the immense majority is "anything you put up for sale", it's just Mossad that wants your family vaction photos), but here's the thing: I do have that right. By default. It might make you unhappy, but I have it. It crosses into a different territory if I deprive you from it (theft), or if the only I would have had to acquired it would be to buy a copy from you(piracy), but ultimately, as a society, we've decided that harming you for it is a line not to be crossed.
I have every right to see a thing. Just like you have every right to try to stop me from doing so. The general rule is that we shouldn't hurt eachother trying to do it/prevent it.
Public domain is the natural state of information. Intellectual property is an absurd state granted monopoly on what boils down to numbers. Copyright in particular is a functionally infinite monopoly that robs us of our public domain rights. Copyright infringement is civil disobedience of unjust laws and arguably a moral imperative. Copyright enforcement requires the destruction of computer freedom as we know it as well as everything the word "hacker" stands for and therefore it must be resisted even if it destroys the copyright industry. It makes zero economic sense to charge money for information which has infinite availability, therefore society must figure out how to pay creators before the work is produced.
Without IP law it is all or nothing: obfuscate, hide, encrypt, and protect lest it become public domain.
With IP law you are given the exclusive, enforceable right to control the distribution and sale of an idea for N years... at which point it becomes public domain.
In either case the decision to publish an idea will inevitably make it public domain. The government protects their shit because $REASONS but there is absolutely no obligation for it to be made public until that protection lapse. In matters of human culture this seems like a bug, not a feature but enforcing some standard of "reasonable worldwide availability" by force seems impossible. The invisible hand of piracy "solves" this oversight and functions like a safety valve.
Not an endorsement of either side, just an observation.
This was fine when N = 28. Now it's life of the author plus 95 so there is almost no possibility of anything released in your lifetime to be a part of the public domain before you die.
Intellectual properties are temporary. Patents and copyrights expire and enter the public domain.
The social contract is we all pretend we can't trivially copy their works for a couple decades so they can turn a profit and then the works enter the public domain.
The constant extensions of copyright duration clearly demonstrate that the copyright industry has no intention to fulfill their end of the deal. They have systematically robbed us of our public domain rights and become rent seekers.
While the US Army isn't allowed to use your house in peace time, if it has any tactical value in war time, it can and will have access to your house. The US Army is the personification of the tax dollars of GP, through the government.
Because of the US's relationship with personal property, it has been decided that only the worst case scenarios lead to these rights being "shared", but on less important subjects, especially ones that cost you nothing in the case of having a copy of your work made, yes. Things like the Audio Home Recording Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act) make it legal for me to make a copy of your work. What happens with this copy depends, maybe I'll share it with friends (and in this case, IP law will consider it minor enough that they won't care), maybe I'll resell it and make money from it (which IP law definitely considers a big no no).
You must be naive if you believe that you have any right to both benefit from public protection _and_ keep full control over how <thing> gets used.
It's not ridiculous, that's the deal (at least it was). It's not actual property. It's a made up concept, you actually lose nothing physical if it's copied. That concept was created and granted to encourage people to create.
You get a certain period to commercialize it, then it's public property. Hiding it away to prevent that is a breach of the spirit of the agreement society made with the creator.
That you believe it's a "ridiculous" argument shows how much you've been brainwashed by corporations.
All this stuff is generally built on the shoulders of previous works, that are public domain. Copying story structures, phrasing, etc. Even entire storylines.
And that's before we get onto the fact that all these corporations benefited from eveything we paid for. Laws to protect their IP, enforcement, infrastructure paid with by public money, education of workers, etc..
They've got their hands out to take, take, take, but when it comes to holding up to their part of the bargain, it's suddenly extensions on copyright terms, minor tweaks to "renew" IP that was never part of the original deal, etc. while feeding a ton of cash to politicians in what looks like a bribe, acts like a bribe, but is termed "lobbying".
> if my tax dollars went towards protecting your shit, you owe society access
Well, the protection is only from random people accessing one's stuff, so this is a very silly (in fact nonsensical) argument. "If my tax dollars went towards you having right X, I thus deserve to infringe on that right X".
> I’m personally of the mind that if my tax dollars went towards protecting your shit, you owe society access.
Our tax dollars go towards protecting lots of different things for lots of different people (including me and you) that we have no rights to at all, nor ever will.
And they are taxed in different ways to pay for it(property taxes) or I and society at large get some benefit(protecting utility companies property that I can’t access)
If that were the case then no physical artwork could be privately held. That, too, is covered by IP laws but there is no obligation to provide society access.
Physical artwork is not covered by IP law. Reproductions of the artwork are covered by IP law. Physical property is already covered by regular property rights
Freedoms are a balancing of rights between two or more parties, and are never absolute. Complicating the matter futher: it is very unlikely that all parties are going to agree what that balancing of rights looks like. For example, someone who shares knowledge (e.g. a teacher) is going to have a very different perspective on copyright law than a person who sells knowlege (e.g. a publisher).
Yeah yeah, but the one I replied to couldn't understand why people felt entitled to see something just because it exists.
I can totally understand that, it just means they don't buy the various excuses for why they shouldn't be allowed to. I wouldn't either, in most "lost media" cases.
Where did that come from? 'You aren't allowed to prevent others from sharing this thing' is completely different from 'you have to share this thing'. 'Everyone is allowed to share everything' is a freedom, not a restriction.
Whether or not it's a freedom people should have is a difficult question to answer because we don't know what the modern world would be like without copyright (I expect creators would try and get paid for creating more works so it might look like how nowadays some shows end in cliffhangers to give the creators some leverage over the publishers to say 'look, people want to know what comes next, maybe you should let us do another season').
Interest in lost media is a harmless hobby, which occasionally yields positive fruit. Reddit looked for the identity of the song "Subways of your Mind" for 17 years before it was found, and I'm sure the band was pleased to learn their music had found such interest so many years later. Where's the harm? Calling it "obsession" to make it sound bad can be done to any hobby.
I guess only boxpig41 knows what else was protected that caused them to replace the file just to avoid the chance that the real password might get out and those might be unlocked, though at this point I’m assuming those encrypted files are gone or are no longer important.
Minecraft (java edition) has been decompiled, modded with different launchers and recompiled since ages. The reason you need a "launcher" is because for some reason Minecraft's jar file doesn't have a way of downloading all the assets Minecraft needs in order to run.
Both of them were eventually decrypted. The decoy was a misdirection attempt to get people to shut up about the whole thing, since the original contained a passphrase that had been reused multiple times for Mojang's internal operations. But it only caused more people to go digging as they noticed the hash changed, along with an employee acting highly defensive about it.
They used "boxpig41" for the original and "thespicemustflow" for the decoy. Both of them contain the jar and assets for Minecraft 1.0, but the original also contained an ordinary copy of the Minecraft launcher, so that the files could used to run it during a live event even if internet access goes down, hence the larger file size.
