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Today Microsoft Banned My Country Iran from Minecraft

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Re: Today Microsoft Banned My Country Iran from Minecraft

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a dictatorship. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Leader_of_Iran

That's not a dictatorship. It's a leader without powers to make laws. The leader makes decrees. And the leader is selected by a small council. It is akin to the monarchy in Britain.

Have a look at Wikipedia -- there can be a small group of people who are the dictators, doesn't have to be just one:

"A dictatorship is an autocratic form of government which is characterized by a leader, or a group of leaders, who hold governmental powers with few to no limitations."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship

Re: Today Microsoft Banned My Country Iran from Minecraft

#132
post #127
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just say you don't believe Palestinians are people so didn't have any right to their homeland. This kind of comment is not warranted. It is beneath the standards of Hacker News. It's putting words in my mouth which I vehemently disagree with. I will attempt to answer the rest of your comment civilly, but if you think that anyone who disagrees with you is evil, may I suggest your worldview is... incorrect. > Moreove…

> Not sure why you think so. There had always been a minority of Jews in Palestine. By 1890, that was a 10% minority. By 1947, that was a 30% minority. What exactly is bullshit about saying this? There were the indigenous inhabitants of the region. Then European powers started funding and arming a mass migration into Palestine, and in a totally unsurprising turn of events that increased the proportion of that region…

> There were the indigenous inhabitants of the region.

That region has a long history. How do you think those inhabitants got there in the first place? They also migrated there. Long in the past, Jews were there, and were probably there before these current "indigienous" population, if they weren't all part of the same group (Jews and Palestinians are basically cousins, genetically speaking).

But does any of that really matter at this stage? Does the fact that there were 250k Palestinians in that land 200 years ago really mean that all that land now rightfully belongs to them and no one else is ever allowed to live on it, despite it being home to 15 million people now? Does the fact that at this stage, multiple generations of Israelis have been born and raised in Israel not mean anything, because "they weren't there originally"?

> Israel is the name the invaders gave to the country after they seized control of it from the people who lived there prior to the invasion. We could call it a European invasion, because the colonizers were from all over Europe, and were funded by Europe, if that helps?

Why do you insist on calling it an invasion at all? Are the Chinese "invading" the US because some people from China have legally moved to the US?

Invasion implies this was illegal and/or done using force, neither of which is true of the Jews that moved to Palestine.

> Yes there are _some_ Palestinians that are allowed to vote by magically being classified as Israeli, but the overwhelming majority are not permitted to because Israel decreed that only specific parts of Palestine count as being Israel for the purpose of having rights.

There's nothing "magical" about it. Some Palestinians fled Israel when it was founded, for various disputed reasons. Some fled to Jordan, some to Egypt, some to Syria I think, etc, and they had various different statuses until 1967. Some are still in refugee camps in Syria, for example. The ones in Jordan were given Jordanian citizenship. None of these are Israeli citizens, nor did Israel have any control over their lives until 1967.

The Palestinians that didn't flee but rather stayed in Israel, became Israeli citizens, and now have full rights.

The reason Israel has any control over the Palestinians who are not citizens is that there was a war with the Arab countries surrounding Israel, and in that war, Israel captured a few territories from its neighboring countries - Gaza, the West Bank, and the Sinai peninsula. The Palestinians in the West Bank have since then been under military occupation, the ones in Gaza were under occupation until 2005, when Israel unilaterally disengaged from Gaza and left them to govern themselves (though some people consider it still under some form of occupation because of the blockade and other reasons).

(Worth noting that the Sinai was given back to Egypt for a peace agreement with them, a peace that has held for 50 years.)

The Palestinians themselves, in the Oslo agreements, recognized Israel as a state, and got a form of self-government. They are not Israeli citizens and are not trying to be Israeli citizens; at least officially, the representative of the Palestinian people work towards a two-state solution, which would mean a Palestinian state side-by-side with an Israeli state.

This has unfortunately not been achieved yet, for many reasons, with Israel definitely sharing a lot of the blame IMO. But it is the agreed-upon end-state by almost anyone with any actual position among the Palestinians.

What do you think is a good end-state here? You raise a lot of legit grievances that Palestinians have, and though I dispute much of the details of your history, I don't disagree that Palestinians in some ways got the short end of the stick here. Still, that was 75 years ago - relitigating the past is different from actually trying to solve the situation today, and I wonder what you think should happen.

Re: Today Microsoft Banned My Country Iran from Minecraft

#133

> A children's block game is not going to help us build nukes or anything, so the sanctions excuse doesn't make sense especially since I already own it. While I agree with that sentiment, and while I admit that I don't know exactly what the sanctions entail, it is quite possible that this is a legal compliance issue and not strictly Microsoft's doing. And of course it could also be a "better safe than sorry" policy w…

It's not all about preventing the creation of nuclear weapons. It's also about making sure the common person in $SANCTIONED_COUNTRY feels the pain. User UncleEntity says it better than I could in a comment that is buried a few levels: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40158797

It might be better, though, to keep open communication channels between average people in the two nations. The more you isolate people in $SANCTIONED_COUNTRY the more they get their information filtered by those in power. Iran is likely perfectly happy that Iranians have been cut off from Minecraft.

Re: Today Microsoft Banned My Country Iran from Minecraft

#134
post #127
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just say you don't believe Palestinians are people so didn't have any right to their homeland. This kind of comment is not warranted. It is beneath the standards of Hacker News. It's putting words in my mouth which I vehemently disagree with. I will attempt to answer the rest of your comment civilly, but if you think that anyone who disagrees with you is evil, may I suggest your worldview is... incorrect. > Moreove…

> Not sure why you think so. There had always been a minority of Jews in Palestine. By 1890, that was a 10% minority. By 1947, that was a 30% minority. What exactly is bullshit about saying this? There were the indigenous inhabitants of the region. Then European powers started funding and arming a mass migration into Palestine, and in a totally unsurprising turn of events that increased the proportion of that region…

Whoah. The majority of Israeli Jewish people are not European; they're people of MENA origin. And, of course, there are over 2 million Israeli-Arab citizens.

Re: Today Microsoft Banned My Country Iran from Minecraft

#135
post #117
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot to say about Israel, but what you said isn't true. Israel didn't "invade" the land. Jews moved into the land legally, and then the rulers of the land at the time gave it to the UN to recommend what to do with it, given that there were two peoples there. The UN recommended splitting it into two parts, one for each people (the Arabs and the Jews). The Jews agreed to this plan, the Arabs didn't. The Jews t…

> Israel didn't "invade" the land. Jews moved into the land legally, and then the rulers of the land at the time gave it to the UN to recommend what to do with it, given that there were two peoples there. Right, and remember, slave owners didn't kidnap people, slaves were legal property. Moreover, there were not two people living there, there were the people who had been living there for thousands of years, who had b…

Prior to British Mandatory Palestine, everyone living in the territory you're talking about was a subject of the Ottoman empire; the British --- certainly not the heroes of this story --- didn't steal any self-determination from the people there, because none existed.

I don't see the commenter you're replying to saying that Palestinians don't have any rights to their own homeland, for what it's worth.

Always useful to keep in mind that this is an immensely complicated struggle, not well captured by any slogan or argument that fits in an HN comment, and that it is extraordinarily unlikely that we're going to resolve it on HN at all.

You're both great commenters on this site. If you're at an impasse over this, maybe agreeing to disagree is a strong move here?

Re: Today Microsoft Banned My Country Iran from Minecraft

#136
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source means the developers release the source code willingly and encourage other people to use it. Minecraft is not now and never has been open source.

They do release the source mapping of the java version alongside the binary. Which can be used to decompile the whole game back to compilable java file. (And you can fiddle it around starting from there). It's source available if you do own the game. So I say 'basically'. The bedrock version on the other hand is completely proprietary. With very little extension api exposed. So there is very few mods of them.

That's decompiled source and while, for Java at least, it can be pretty usable, it's actually going to differ in many ways from the original source due to optimization and obfuscation. I'm fairly sure neither Mojang nor Microsoft were particularly pleased about this, indeed their use of obfuscation implies they want to make your life more difficult doing it.

I think your point is that the Java version at least is easy to modify, but that's because it's in Java, not because Microsoft wants you to. "Open source" and even "source available" are terms of art which don't apply here. "Very hackable" seems more appropriate.

Re: Today Microsoft Banned My Country Iran from Minecraft

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minecraft is likely one of the easiest popular games to find a crack for in existence. You just Google "reddit Minecraft cracked launcher" and you'll find the popular choices. Of course, you'll only be able to play on servers that do not authenticate accounts this way.

Yes, but what are the chances the one you choose comes with malware? Think of it this way: if I want to spread malware, what better way than a cracked Minecraft launcher?

> Yes, but what are the chances the one you choose comes with malware?

These aren't 10 download, unknown group uploads. These launchers are used by thousands of people, and if you just go to the one with hundreds of upvotes on reddit it's the same risk as downloading any other kind of non-billion-dollar-company software.

Cracked minecraft clients have been around for over a decade at this point, and third-party minecraft launchers are not a niche thing at all. Compromises have happened, but that's not unique to Minecraft.

> Think of it this way: if I want to spread malware, what better way than a cracked Minecraft launcher?

Fake leaked songs, videos, new video games, Roblox/Fortnite in-game currency generators, video streaming sites with malware ads...

Re: Today Microsoft Banned My Country Iran from Minecraft

#138
post #94

Instead of actually doing anything serious about the regime, they have chosen to do meaningless stuff that only strengthens the military dictatorship regime. I wonder what kickbacks the politicians get from literally helping them.

Microsoft does this because of sanctions, not because the dictatorship is paying them off.

Im not blaming microsoft, im blaming the leadership and their half-assed policies. They are forcing microsoft to have there meaningless sanctions blocking minecraft for example

Re: Today Microsoft Banned My Country Iran from Minecraft

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a dictatorship. It's a leader without powers to make laws. The leader makes decrees. And the leader is selected by a small council. It is akin to the monarchy in Britain.

Have a look at Wikipedia -- there can be a small group of people who are the dictators, doesn't have to be just one: "A dictatorship is an autocratic form of government which is characterized by a leader, or a group of leaders, who hold governmental powers with few to no limitations." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship

Except the leader is not a group of leaders. It is just one leader. And he answers the council who can vote to remove him. This is far from a dictatorship

Re: Today Microsoft Banned My Country Iran from Minecraft

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is what they were saying. The political and economic state in Iran is about as far from Afghanistan as possible. Iran/Persia has a long history of national identity and has a highly organized society. Afghanistan is a tribal region and still does not have a sense of nation or really a mature sense of political identity. Iran is also a major power player in Asia with a far stronger economy, with a G…

IRI is likely in control of IRGC at this point. They summoned ambassadors the other week with FM completely out of the loop! The revolutionary courts just ignored the supreme court's judgment and sentenced Toomaj Salahi -- a rap artist that expressed the voice of the people in his dissident songs -- to death. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/world/middleeast/iran-rap... Btw, HN, that young man's life can be saved.…

IRI is the acronym for Iran's official name, Islamic Republic of Iran. I'm reading this as Iran is in control of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. What are you referring to exactly in your first sentence?
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