[HN Gopher] Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise susp...
___________________________________________________________________
Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension
Author : CTOSian
Score : 591 points
Date : 2026-01-05 10:23 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (torrentfreak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (torrentfreak.com)
| delis-thumbs-7e wrote:
| https://annas-archive.se/ Works still
| andrepd wrote:
| https://open-slum.org/
| rockostrich wrote:
| Seems like SLUM is down.
| squigz wrote:
| Just the HN hug of death. Here's another
|
| https://open-slum.pages.dev/
| dmm wrote:
| > We recommend checking our Wikipedia page for the latest
| domains.
|
| I wonder how wikipedia feels being used as DNS?
|
| EDIT: Apparently this is a well known practice. Some interesting
| discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40008383
| miroljub wrote:
| Anna Archive is a notable project. Wikipedia displays links to
| projects. It's not about "being used as DNS" but about
| providing basic info about the topic, URL being an important
| part of it.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| But this mechanism is used to circumvent DNS blockade.
| Wikipedia may be next to moderate if they can force DNS
| providers and even the org registrar to give in, wikipedia
| could fold too.
|
| Then pastebin, never ending cat and mouse game.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| DNS is another layer. The URLs shown on Wikipedia will
| still have to be resolved to IP addresses, which is where
| DNS comes in. Referring to Wikipedia for the URLs/domains
| does nothing to circumvent DNS blockades.
| miyuru wrote:
| Maybe with the upcoming IP address certificates, we can
| use IP addresses again. I remember using IP addresses to
| access some sites in the past.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44379034
| rzerowan wrote:
| Evenn though its onelayer down - the same tactics that
| were used to suspend/takeover domains would still apply ,
| at the end of the day one still has to get the IPv4/IPv6
| address from someone(who can be coerced).
| immibis wrote:
| When Trump pressures RIPE NCC or APNIC to deregister an
| IP address block, that's the end of the internet as we
| know it, and the return to national networks with very
| limited interconnection. Even Russia still has address
| registrations despite being sanctioned.
|
| Alternatively they pressure USA ISPs to block the
| addresses. That's already regularly done but it probably
| won't be enough to satisfy the extortion industrial
| complex which is out for blood.
| miroljub wrote:
| > When Trump pressures RIPE NCC or APNIC to deregister an
| IP address block
|
| sed "/Trump/US-Govt/g"
|
| Why do people here always casually single out Trump? He's
| not an outlier, it's just how US foreign policy has
| worked for centuries.
| ddingus wrote:
| "Not an outlier"
|
| A quick look at the last few administrations is all
| anyone needs to see how this one interprets the powers
| and duties that come with the office.
|
| One of my favorite phrases coined during the last Trump
| administration was something like, "not just wrong, but
| wrong beyond normal parameters." It basically meant
| exactly what we are discussing here; namely, being an
| outlier of some sort.
| miroljub wrote:
| I specifically mentioned foreign policy. There, I don't
| remember a single US government that was not a net
| negative for the rest of the world (Israel excluded).
| IshKebab wrote:
| It circumvents the _purpose_ of the DNS block which is
| meant to prevent people from easily finding the site.
| Anna 's Archive can easily register new domain names and
| put them on Wikipedia, thus allowing people to easily
| discover the new location of the site.
|
| Of course many sites can serve as "DNS" - Reddit, Github,
| X, basically anywhere you can put a URL. So DNS blocking
| is relatively useless.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Why should wikipedia fold? Can any country put any
| legitimate pressure against them for just listing a domain.
| layer8 wrote:
| Linking to illegal services can be illegal, that's why.
| miroljub wrote:
| > Linking to illegal services can be illegal, that's why.
|
| What is illegal in one country can be illegal everywhere.
|
| I don't remember Wikipedia removing LGBTIAQ++ articles
| just because that's illegal in Iran.
|
| If a government thinks Wikipedia is illegal in their
| country, they can force local ISP providers to block it,
| but it's not Wikipedia's responsibility [1] to censor
| itself.
|
| [1] at least should not be
| layer8 wrote:
| The Wikimedia Foundation is a US corporation. There are
| national chapters in some other countries, which are
| corporations in the respective country. The internet
| isn't the Wild West; websites are subject to the laws of
| the countries they operate in.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| What country does Anna's archive operate in?
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| No it's not, at least in US. Google fought and won this
| case.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Why should registrar/ISP fold?
|
| It's not that they should, they often do though.
| mmooss wrote:
| Countries can pressure them for many reasons, fairly or
| not. Under pressure, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales
| interfered with a page about the war in Gaza (though I
| don't know th outcome of that).
| blell wrote:
| Kiwifarms is also a notable web site but they do not show a
| link to it. This means there is editorialisation going on.
| miroljub wrote:
| That's a common problem of English, German, and a few more
| Wikipedia editor gangs seeing themselves as the moral
| guardians of the internet.
|
| If you switch to some other languages, you'll find the
| links.
| gpm wrote:
| Having a sense of morality is not a problem. Good for
| them.
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| The good Puritans of Wikipedia, with their carefully
| curated infographics of every perverted act you could
| think of.
|
| For some reason Britannica doesn't have an article for
| "Anal Creampie" complete with animation. Maybe they're
| understaffed or their editors forgot to add it.
| taco_emoji wrote:
| So I guess your implication is that a catalog of sex acts
| is somehow immoral?
| gpm wrote:
| Your point is that... Wikpedia editors choice to have
| articles about sex acts is morally inconsistent with a
| choice not to have direct links to a site a based around
| harassing, stalking, doxing, etc that has been directly
| tied to multiple suicides?
|
| I don't see the connection frankly.
|
| PS. English Wikipedia also does not appear to have an
| "Anal Creampie" article, let alone one with an animation.
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creampie_(sexual_act)
|
| Kurt Vonnegut says hello.
| gpm wrote:
| Oh look, an article which isn't titled what you claimed,
| or about what you claimed, and doesn't include an
| animation.
|
| Who?
|
| And I still don't see the moral relevance of any of this
| to choosing not to link to a site that has harassed
| people into killing themselves.
| timeon wrote:
| How did you found the link?
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| reasonably explained by the chasm of difference in intent
| and impact between anna's archive and kiwifarms
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| Wikipedia is an ultra-editorialized site that raises funds
| yearly for use in progressive activism. This is generally
| widely understood.
| slater wrote:
| It's none of those things.
| gpm wrote:
| As much as I'd like to claim the values [1] that
| Wikimedia (the foundation behind wikipedia) supports as a
| progressive - I think they're quite independent of the
| progressive/conservative spectrum.
|
| [1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/public-policy/
| redeeman wrote:
| well I guess if they claim it themselves. I heard Israel
| doesnt think its comitting genocide, that Russia is
| rightously doing gods work. Whom did i hear it from?
| well, themselves of course!
| soldthat wrote:
| Israel's enemies are open with their intent towards Jews
| - at least in Arabic. The Houthis even put it on their
| flag!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarkha
| metalliqaz wrote:
| As Stephen Colbert once said, "Everyone knows reality has
| a clear liberal bias."
|
| When conservatism has explicitly turned against
| enlightenment values, the opposite would be anti-
| conservative. I'm glad _someone_ hasn 't given up the
| fight.
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| I'd like to see the intersection of people that think AA is
| some last bastion of Internet freedom, while simultaneously
| trying to get all of KF's routes blackholed.
|
| The problem with playing internet police is there is always
| inherent bias.
| spencerflem wrote:
| What a crazy worldview: to think that good things are
| good and bad things are bad.
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| Who is the official judge and jury of the Internet?
| spencerflem wrote:
| In this specific case of what's allowed on wikipedia: the
| Wikimedia Foundation
| turblety wrote:
| Seems like great publicity for Anna's Archive. I've heard an
| increasing amount about Anna's Archive over the last 12 months.
| It has popped up a lot. I wonder if they've seen their traffic
| spike a lot.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| I also discovered it via one of the blocking controversies. The
| attacked is weaponized for discovery. karma at its best.
| intheitmines wrote:
| see streisand effect:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Agreed. I'd never heard of it. Now I'll be checking it out with
| a view to supporting it.
| AstroNutt wrote:
| Definitely. I never knew about it. Now it's bookmarked.
| anthk wrote:
| They could always use Yggdrasil.
| flipped wrote:
| I have no clue why you're getting downvoted but ygg is a solid
| option but it would overwhelm the network since AA has intense
| traffic.
| anthk wrote:
| IPFS then. It's just static content, so it has sense to be
| distributed between nodes. Not under ygg of course.
|
| On the YGG network, I've used streaming without many issues,
| plus BT. And people have been even gaming over YGG.
|
| Altough they could use YGG for a static address and then just
| use IPFS for the data but outside of YGG.
| flipped wrote:
| I like IPFS but decentralized storage is just awfully
| expensive to maintain without any reward. Main IPFS mirrors
| don't tolerate AA content, it's taken down very quickly.
| mystraline wrote:
| And also IPFS rats our to the whole world all your
| network interfaces, MAC addresses, and internal network
| configs.
|
| And even after multiple requests of supporting a Tor
| mode, have routinely ignored that with "but its too
| hard!"
|
| And, I quit running IPFS back in the .31 version after
| adding some chat logs to my local machine's share, and
| found a google crawler within 1 hour and fully indexed
| them.
|
| No thanks.
| flipped wrote:
| What? That's the laziest argument against IPFS. Bind it
| on one interface or just use a VM.
| mystraline wrote:
| Defaults absolutely matter.
|
| And no, I dont my whole internal network enumerable
| because of 'convenience'.
| anthk wrote:
| IPFS support interface binding, hard disk quotas, working
| as a router or not, and bandwidth quotas among several
| settings. Yes, by default can be a bit intensive.
| Ycros wrote:
| yeah no shit, this is what happens when you agitate the major
| music record labels - it's going to get worse
| xandrius wrote:
| Yep, let's accept the monstrous industries which lock down
| culture for money.
|
| I for one support their efforts. The same way we store seeds in
| vaults deep in the depths of the earth, we should do this for
| digital content too, and without retaliation from any specific
| industry.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Agree with you and I'd also like to see more abuse by said
| companies punished
|
| They went after Pirate Bay by literally threatening trade war
| repercussions with Sweden which is far more destructive than
| any files downloaded
| hirako2000 wrote:
| What would be better is solve the root problem. These
| (illegal, somewhat legitimate) hoarding sites are most
| valuable for research literature which, given the public
| funding nature of these things should not be gated to begin
| with.
|
| The comsequence of resolving the symptoms is that
| illegitimate use piggy back on it. Artistic literature that
| would legitimately deserve protection get hoarded as well.
|
| Sweating authors of clearly copyrightable arts, typically
| novels, manuals, are seeing their work accessed free of
| royalties. For the sake of freely distributing scientific
| literature.
|
| It makes it impossible to make then distinction given the
| legitimate utility is operating in a dark domain.
| fragmede wrote:
| GitHub did it for source code.
|
| https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/
| Ycros wrote:
| Yes, we should archive everything. And we should perhaps
| reform IP more broadly and re-think how we treat our culture.
| And we shouldn't expect retaliation.
|
| But retaliation will happen, and I worry that it's going to
| pull down one of the most incredible archives along with it.
| squigz wrote:
| TPB is still up, 20+ years later, despite plenty of
| attention from similar groups.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| In that case it would be Elsevier and co.
| jsheard wrote:
| Anna's Archive recently released a dump of the entire Spotify
| catalogue so they are very much in the music industries
| crosshairs as well now.
| layer8 wrote:
| Only metadata has been released so far.
| rswail wrote:
| A lot of which was contributed by users typing in CD play
| lists to CDDB which got corporatised by GraceNote and
| ended up somewhere in Sony land.
|
| So this effectively re-releases into the public domain a
| lot of the user contributions during the 1990s.
| RCitronsBroker wrote:
| also have the feeling that going for music is going to turn out
| badly
| xandrius wrote:
| And that's why helping torrenting and seeding the content of AA
| is vital: they can take down a domain name but not block everyone
| who seeds.
|
| I said this before but if you've got some spare GB/TB on a
| computer/server, consider "donating" it for culture preservation
| purposes:https://annas-archive.se/torre nts
| CommanderData wrote:
| Looking at mutable torrents recently and it's ability to
| circumvent censorship via DHT.
|
| I wonder if it could be revived.
|
| The only problem is the mutable torrents standard is in draft
| and not adopted widely. I think I saw someone proposing using
| DHT in a way that allows them to host websites. If feasible
| becomes very difficult to take down.
| haunter wrote:
| I wish I knew what I was seeding though
|
| And I don't mean the copyrighted part (I don't care about that)
| but the actual content which might be questionable
| hliyan wrote:
| Is this an abuse of the ServerHold status? Was this the same
| mechanism used to delist a Gaza video archive recently?
|
| > This status code is set by your domain's Registry Operator.
| Your domain is not activated in the DNS.
|
| > If you provided delegation information (name servers), this
| status may indicate an issue with your domain that needs
| resolution. If so, you should contact your registrar to request
| more information. If your domain does not have any issues, but
| you need it to resolve in the DNS, you must first contact your
| registrar in order to provide the necessary delegation
| information.
|
| https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/epp-status-codes-2014-...
| ishanjain28 wrote:
| Yes. Genocide.live is under clientHold status by namecheap and
| they are trying to transfer it out.
| TitaRusell wrote:
| The genocide will not be televised!
|
| (A judge in the Netherlands settled the question if there is
| a genocide going on and since then we've been on Israels
| naughty list lol)
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I don't know much about the story or that site, but I can
| just open it from my end? Whois information also doesn't seem
| to show any special status.
| GordonS wrote:
| After publicly shaming NameCheap on Twitter, NameCheap
| backed down a little. They've still de-platformed
| genocide.live, but released the DNS name so the owner could
| transfer it out. IIRC, they are using a "free speech"
| provider in Estonia now.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| Hey, that's the same Namecheap that banned Russian
| citizens for being Russian in 2022? Nice to hear they're
| still principled.
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| I'm pretty sure serverHold being applied to domains targeted by
| court orders is normal. It also has all of the xProhibited
| statuses which ICANN notes are "usually enacted during legal
| disputes".
| koheripbal wrote:
| To add a little context, this suspension comes immediately
| after Anna's Archive publicly implicated themselves in the
| Spotify scraping "hack" in which they downloaded nearly the
| entire content library of Spotify and was preparing to release
| it publicly (~300TB worth) via torrent.
|
| They published a blog post outlining their plans.
| pnathan wrote:
| Did the operators _want_ to poke the well connected & well
| funded bear with a historical anger problem?
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| No, but they weren't _not_ going to, given that their
| mission is to archive all cultural content, by hook or by
| crook.
| mmooss wrote:
| Archiving it and publishing it are different things.
|
| More importantly, they may sabotage their mission: If
| Spotify shuts them down, their exiting archives and
| especially future archives may be effectively lost.
| lukan wrote:
| Fortunately, Spotify does not have that power. Annas
| Archive is not based in US or EU jurisdictions. They can
| make access for normal people a bit harder, but not shut
| it down.
|
| (Edited for clarity)
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Fortunately, Spotify does not have that power. They are
| not based in US or EU jurisdictions.
|
| Perhaps I misunderstood something, but according to my
| understanding
|
| 1. Spotify is registered in Luxembourg and has its
| operational headquarter in Sweden (Stockholm). Both are
| EU countries.
|
| 2. I guess it won't be Spotify that sues, but the
| individual music labels (very likely united).
| rzzzt wrote:
| Presumably the opposing party is residing in non-US-
| or(and? depends on the order of evaluation)-EU territory,
| but I might be mistaken. "They" refers to both sides in
| the parent comment.
| lukan wrote:
| Annas archive is not based in the EU (sorry for being not
| clear). So the law in EU is limited to enforce a ban. In
| germany it is already "banned" via ISP but just DNS.
|
| But the real servers are hosted in kazachstan or russia I
| think. And they do not cooperate so much with EU courts.
|
| So unless the EU installs a great firewall like china,
| they cannot really shut it down.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| > But the real servers are hosted in kazachstan or russia
| I think. And they do not cooperate so much with EU
| courts.
|
| I believe the "official" AA servers only host the website
| + source code. The actual copyrighted content is stored
| by volunteers who seed the torrents.
| weslleyskah wrote:
| Exactly, this is why the 'Hydra' is difficult to take it
| down.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| I guess I should say more accurately: Their mission is to
| both archive it and publish it. They seem to be
| explicitly against copyright, on principle. Which I
| greatly respect.
| drnick1 wrote:
| It's time to abolish copyright. It creates more problems
| (stiffles innovation, creates rents) than it solves
| (rewards innovation).
| mmooss wrote:
| It doesn't create problems for large companies that make
| AI systems.
| eli wrote:
| I'm not sure archiving and publishing are different
| things.
| mmooss wrote:
| I can save a copy of my friend's book on my computer,
| archiving it. Nobody else could see it unless I publish
| it.
| hamdingers wrote:
| They are, but archiving without publishing is pointless.
|
| I occasionally wonder how many enormous collections of
| culture like that of Marion Stokes[1] have been lost
| because their curators made no effort to realize the
| value of their collection.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
| mmooss wrote:
| Most archives - the ones in libraries, etc. - are not
| published, except they are available to qualified people
| who physically travel there. Most are not even fully
| indexed - nobody knows all of what's there.
| hamdingers wrote:
| My perspective is compatible with this fact. An archive
| that approximately nobody can access and/or nobody knows
| what it contains has no value to society at large, except
| the potential that it may some day be published.
|
| The good news is I'd guess the number of
| (nonreligious/nonproprietary) institutionally managed
| pointless archives is dwindling.
| weslleyskah wrote:
| They stated that they would pass the information on to
| other archivists and public/private trackers no? They
| obviously have backups, since there are multiple users
| seeding Gbs and even TBs of data. Mirrors can be created
| as well, like TPB.
| squigz wrote:
| https://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html
| nashashmi wrote:
| > For now this is a torrents-only archive aimed at
| preservation, but if there is enough interest, we could add
| downloading of individual files to Anna's Archive. Please
| let us know if you'd like this.
|
| If it is torrents only, what relevance does unregistering
| the domain make?
| ddingus wrote:
| Establishing a position Anna's opponents may consider an
| advantage.
|
| And there is a site idea!
|
| Annasopponents.news --> Can inform passersby on anything
| related to Anna's Archive along with activism related
| material, how to's and the like.
| squigz wrote:
| Ideally, if AA doesn't have any public web presence it's
| a lot harder to publicly disseminate those torrents.
|
| Realistically, it's just a way for someone to say
| something is being done about this, even if it's not
| going to actually make a difference.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| They didn't come anywhere close to the entire content
| library, the 300TB represents about 33% of Spotify, though it
| is close to 100% of the played music.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Kind of nuts that 66% of their library is virtually
| unplayed. It's hard to make it as a musician.
| yaur wrote:
| It is ridiculously easy to create an album with Suno and
| push it Spotify. I'm surprised its only 66% TBH
| nkozyra wrote:
| 1. Generate slop music nobody will ever listen to 2. ????
| 3. Profit
| seabrookmx wrote:
| It's actually:
|
| 1. Generate slop music no _human_ will ever listen to
|
| 2. Use a botnet to "play" this music en masse
|
| 3. Profit
|
| This is a whole arms race, with companies (such as
| Beatdapp) specializing in detecting fraudulent plays.
|
| Source: I work for a niche music retailer that struggles
| with the same issues on a smaller scale.
| RachelF wrote:
| Anna's archive has a great analysis of the Spotify data.
|
| They identify a huge surge in tracks that few listen to
| after gen AI started.
|
| The analysis is worth reading. The distribution is
| (Pareto)^3 ~99% of the tracks played are 1% of the
| catalogue.
| krick wrote:
| To be completely fair, I am not certain what it means for
| a track to be "virtually unplayed".
|
| First off, it was striking to me how little of the "top
| 10 000" they published back on Christmas I recognize. I'm
| not sure what I expected, but 10 000 sounds like a big
| number, so it seemed likely to me, that if I get a random
| song from my playlist I could find it there. It turned
| out I hardly can find an artist I recognize. Ok, I can
| recall a song from Lady Gaga and even Billie Eilish, I've
| heard of Bruno Mars (cannot recall any song), but I have
| no idea what is "Bad Bunny", "Doechii", "Drake". I mean,
| I think _I do_ have a pretty good idea what these things
| are (abstractly), and I probably wouldn 't want to listen
| that. And while I knew that all this stuff is very
| popular, I didn't quite realize how little place in the
| top-10000 it leaves for the music I (and everyone I know)
| actually listen to.
|
| I didn't download the metadata they released (it would be
| hard to process it on my laptop anyway), but now I wonder
| how much of my 3 TB music collection is in top 100 000,
| or heck, even top 1M Spotify, or on Spotify at all.
|
| I also am sometimes surprised how little scrobbles some
| tracks get. I didn't bother to find out what this means,
| how many people still scrobble to Last.fm or
| ListenBrainz, but it is just surprising when I see that a
| track that I didn't consider to be obscure was scrobbled
| like 50 times this year.
|
| So I'm saying that music worlds seems to be terribly
| fragmented, even more than I imagined. So the very
| premise of AA backing-up 97% of Spotify (by the number of
| plays) may be much lesser achievement at "preserving
| culture" than it may sound. And of course we are about 8
| years too late to backup _everything_ , since by now half
| of it must be generative NN bullshit. And I'm not even
| sure it's in those leftover 3% (bots listen to bot-
| generated music too, right)?
| iso1631 wrote:
| > It turned out I hardly can find an artist I recognize
|
| I've heard of 9 of the top 10 and 15 of the top 20 at
| https://chartmasters.org/most-monthly-listeners-on-
| spotify/
|
| You might not listen, but surely you have heard of Taylor
| Swift, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay
| and of course Christmas Staples of Mariah Carey and Wham?
| krick wrote:
| First off, this is not the top we are talking about,
| since there is one that AA provided[0]. I am not sure
| what it matters which names exactly I've heard of, but if
| you are that curious: I don't know what is Ed Sheeran and
| Wham (but cannot vouch I've never heard their music in a
| supermarket), but I definitely remember "Coldplay" being
| mentioned in a joke onstage by a NIN member[1], but I
| didn't bother to check out what they are. I can imagine
| the faces of Taylor Swift & Justin Bieber, but cannot
| name any song, and I'm sure I've heard Mariah Carey
| somewhere, since that name is around longer than Rihanna.
| I have a song or two of Ariana Grande in my playlist
| though.
|
| Edit: Ok, I've finally googled "Coldplay". Yeah,
| definitely heard "Clocks" somewhere.
|
| [0] https://annas-archive.li/blog/spotify/spotify-
| top-10k-songs-...
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qboe5CebixA
| krick wrote:
| Yeah, obviously I don't know if it is actually related, but
| my first thought when I couldn't open it today was "Told you
| so"...
| staplers wrote:
| Spotify was created from a library of pirated music.. the
| irony
| ddingus wrote:
| Came here to say that.
|
| An while back, another site started with a pile of
| pirated music, and that was allofmp3.com Remember those
| peeps?
|
| Their business model was to sell music by selling
| bandwidth. Basically is was all the music you want
| charged by the megabit download.
|
| Pop titles were $0.10 to $0.25. A whole album at 256mbps
| was roughly $3 give or take.
|
| What got me really thinking was how great the UX
| experience was. At the time, few came close.
|
| The end of that site was packaged up with Russia's entry
| into the WTO.
|
| I seem to remember hearing about huge torrents out there
| too. The right infohash can point a person to huge
| archives of various kinds, books, video, academic papers,
| music, the WikiLeak insurance files, which is password
| protected, as perhaps all of these are.
| adamors wrote:
| As someone who grew up poor in an ex-Eastern Bloc
| country, allofmp3.com was a godsend.
| pbiggar wrote:
| The Gaza video archive is https://genocide.live, and it was
| Namecheap that took it down.
|
| https://x.com/receipts_lol/status/2006732606164152651
| Zak wrote:
| It looks like it has been restored, and responsibility
| attributed to a moderator acting hastily due to the extreme
| nature of the content:
| https://sunur.substack.com/p/namecheap-stole-the-domain-
| of-g...
|
| I don't like the idea of registrars doing moderation at all.
| intalentive wrote:
| Or Cloudflare, for that matter...
| Zak wrote:
| That's valid, and I think a point that Cloudflare itself
| has acknowledged. Cloudflare is, however not quite as
| fundamental as domain names.
| guelo wrote:
| > liberal progressive hypocrisy
|
| zionist mccarthyism isn't progressive
| constantius wrote:
| Thanks for linking this article! However, the full
| description of the incident seems that Namecheap blocked
| the domain, the CEO got into tweet arguments justifying it
| (and taking inconsistent positions), and after the backlash
| said it was a hasty block by the mod team, without an
| apology.
|
| I generally give NC the benefit of the doubt (because of
| their principled stance on Ukraine, which to me means they
| can be principled elsewhere too), but in this case it's
| very difficult to explain it away.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| The fascist website Stormfront lost their .org in 2017 with
| some very unclear procedural action, but I don't think it was a
| ServerHold. It was offline for quite awhile and I think
| genuinely hurt the site. Although it looks like it's back now?
| weslleyskah wrote:
| I think this was genuinely due to the Norwegian Massacre. The
| guy who did it had an account on stormfront. The whole thing
| exploded and the owner had to explain that he was not in
| contact with the mass murderer.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Full writeup of the Gaza video archive takedown, if you aren't
| up to date on it: https://neosmart.net/blog/namecheap-com-
| revokes-domain-hosti...
|
| In that case, it was the registrar (not the TLD owner) that put
| the domain under clientHold and clientTransferProhibited, etc
| (which disables DNS lookups).
|
| The Genocide.live site is now back up (just yesterday) after
| they raised a fuss on social media, and were able to get the
| domain unlocked to transfer it to Trustname (out of Estonia) as
| their new registrar.
|
| (The Namecheap founder/CEO Richard Kirkendall surprisingly came
| across as surprisingly unaware of how anything to do with
| domain name registries, TLDs, and DNS works on Twitter in an
| exchange where he thought the entity running the .live gTLD was
| the archive's new registrar [1], claimed the domain was
| unlocked for transfer when it was still on clientHold [2], and
| a raft of other silly mistakes.)
|
| [0]: https://neosmart.net/blog/namecheap-com-revokes-domain-
| hosti...
|
| [1]:
| https://x.com/namecheapceo123/status/2007139737379934559?s=2...
|
| [2]:
| https://x.com/namecheapceo123/status/2007228146060259365?s=2...
| yet https://x.com/receipts_lol/status/2007984691476156443?s=20
| silisili wrote:
| Used to work for a registry. Registries do not just arbitrarily
| serverHold things they don't like. Even in blatant abuse cases,
| they'll reach out to the registrar to clientHold it or delete
| it instead.
|
| I suspect this came from a court order. The only time I
| remember serverHolding things were from court orders or other
| legal requests(FBI/DHS/etc). Though the latter would often just
| ask for the nameservers to be changed instead.
| omoikane wrote:
| I remember itch.io was put on serverHold by having someone
| claim there was "fraud and phishing":
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42363727
|
| But .org is managed differently from .io, so maybe a more
| formal legal action was taken.
| comex wrote:
| Not my experience. My personal .us domain was placed in
| serverHold in April 2025, after Godaddy Registry sent my
| registrar an email including the following:
|
| "If we do not receive a response and the abusive content
| remains active, the referred domain will be suspended
| (-ServerHold-) twelve (12) hours after this notification, to
| limit any potential damage."
|
| Yes, only 12 hours' notice. And this was in response to what
| looked like an automated scan, with a screenshot of a
| directory listing showing some files with (accurate)
| modification times in 2011. This would not have passed more
| than a quite cursory human review. And there is no chance
| that anyone was using the files, as they were at an unused
| path (which happened to be exposed via directory listings).
|
| (How do I know that the files haven't been infected without
| my knowledge? Because I checked, but also because I know why
| they were flagged as malicious. The files contain an exploit,
| and will try to exploit your browser if you open them. But
| the exploit only works on 2011-era iOS! The iOS version
| numbers are right there in the filenames! The files are not
| real malware, but part of a jailbreak, JailbreakMe, that
| installs software of your choice on your phone... if your
| phone is an iPhone from 2011. I continue to host the
| jailbreak on purpose, for the sake of a handful of people
| that still use these devices. I guess you can call it
| retrocomputing. This particular subset of files was unused
| though.)
| silisili wrote:
| .US is a bit of an oddball, at least compared to gtlds. The
| US DoC puts rather strict requirements on the registry
| under contract, including this but also spot checks that
| owners are US citizens, and makes it the responsibility of
| the registry to take action on it.
|
| Those scans are automated but supposed to have human-in-
| the-loop, though that doesn't really mean much either.
| Unfortunately, once the process starts, receiving no
| response means an automatic suspension.
| andai wrote:
| literally 1984
| sanskritical wrote:
| I recommend Anna's Archive get a Nostr account. Once they finally
| have a solid court order to seize domains, generally the rate at
| which they get seized accelerates greatly. Nostr is the only
| decentralized manner (no, Mastodon/fediverse is dependent on
| domain names, which are getting seized by courts in relation to
| this -- it is not decentralized at all when it comes down to it)
| that people can reliably use to have a latest content feed
| distributed.
|
| "Check Wikipedia to evade the court order" just encourages legal
| action against Wikipedia. Even linking to copyright violations
| is, under current court precedent, able to bring civil liability
| upon third parties. It is draconian and our framers would have
| considered it a clear First Amendment violation, but
| unfortunately the current jurisprudence says that is the law.
| tasuki wrote:
| Trying to understand nostr, I looked up its Wikipedia page...
|
| > In 2024, in an article reporting on the project's funding,
| Business Insider claimed to have identified fiatjaf, and had
| found two websites previously published by this person to
| disseminate the work of Olavo de Carvalho, a far-right
| conspiracy theorist.
|
| That... seems extremely irrelevant. If fiatjaf is contributing
| something useful and significant to the commons, why does it
| matter that he used to spread far-right conspiracy theories in
| the past?
|
| > As a result of its ability to quickly and discreetly create
| accounts and publish posts to relays, Nostr can propagate spam
| much more easily if left unchecked. A notable example includes
| a case where multiple protocol bridges have been used to
| conduct spam waves on the Bluesky social network (itself
| connected to a competing protocol, the AT Protocol) by creating
| posts on Nostr, bridging the post to ActivityPub and bridging
| it again to Bluesky.
|
| Surely they also had to create a Bluesky account for that? I
| don't see how Nostr is to blame here. Perhaps Bluesky forgot to
| use anti-spam measures when bridging things over from other
| sources? That's kind of on Bluesky, no?
|
| This reads like a smear campaign against Nostr. I don't think I
| have the necessary Wikipedia karma to get it amended, but gee
| do I have opinions on this...
| squigz wrote:
| You don't need "karma" to edit Wikipedia.
| lambdaone wrote:
| Some pages have 'semi-protection' or 'extended semi-
| protection', where a user must have a Wikipedia account
| which must have made a certain number of edits and be older
| than a specified time period.
|
| However, this isn't one of them.
|
| You can edit it immediately, either with or without
| creating an account.
| sanskritical wrote:
| > This reads like a smear campaign against Nostr.
|
| It's well known that corporations and governments pay people
| fulltime to edit Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a whole article
| detailing the extent of it:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-
| interest_editing_o...
|
| Of course, these days the people paid to do this have learned
| not to do edits from their own corporation or government
| office's announced IP blocks. But in times passed finding
| many of this category of edits was as simple as sorting edits
| on Wikipedia by the originating IP address and looking for
| which ones came from institutionally announced subnets.
|
| Point being, massive amounts of capital and intelligence
| resources have been dedicated to censoring social media.
| There's nanny employees in every single social media company
| making sure "important" complainers are heard and their
| desires to silence voices fulfilled. I follow a large number
| of people on Nostr that have been banned from _every other
| platform_. Facebook. Twitter. Bluesky. "Free speech" sites
| like Gab and ActivityPub servers that advertise "free
| speech". But Nostr has the same entrance requirements and
| cryptographic sovereignty that Bitcoin provides. Generate a
| keypair and you can publish. People that want to find your
| content can simply subscribe to your public key. This results
| in a subversion of countless state and corporate capital
| expenditures. If people use Nostr, they will permanently lose
| the ability to moderate content in this oppressive manner.
| They absolutely do not want this to happen.
|
| > Nostr can propagate spam much more easily if left
| unchecked.
|
| Nowhere have I had a worse problem with spam than Twitter and
| Facebook. For all the alleged vulnerability of Nostr to spam,
| it has not currently materialized as an issue.
|
| Note that filtering out actual spam without a centralized
| moderator is one of the most solved problems on the Internet.
| If you've ever installed Spamassassin or other well
| subscribed to Bayesian filters on an email server, you know
| that you never see spam ever again. In actuality, spam is a
| much bigger problem when you are dependent on fickle human
| moderation.
| xvector wrote:
| Definitely a smear campaign, ironically one that seems to be
| organized by left-leaning individuals on Wikipedia, Business
| Insider, etc.
|
| Which is bizarre to me because aren't these the people that
| would _want_ the ability to disseminate information in the
| face of fascism?
|
| They are attacking their own side (again.) When will
| idealists learn that this is not the way?
| sanskritical wrote:
| The defining feature of fascism is these kind of tyrannical
| public-private partnerships. It was the entire basis of
| Mussolini's fascism. They are the literal fascists.
|
| Redifining fascism as meaning "racism and anti-semitism"
| (certainly attitudes which by the current definition far
| predate fascism) has been one of the most clever acts of
| sleight of hand by the regime, giving it unlimited freedom
| to enact the most totalitarian form of fascism ever
| conceived.
| Matl wrote:
| > left-leaning individuals
|
| Here we go again.
|
| As a 'left-leaning individual' it's funny because if you
| look up anti-war left leaning outlets and such on
| Wikipedia, they don't tend to have exactly glowing entries
| on there. Wikipedia and the other outlets described as
| 'left-leaning' are neoliberal institutions. Believe me that
| there's no love for these on the left.
|
| When it's convenient for smears, neoliberals are left but
| then at other times it's the communists etc. In other
| words, 'left-leaning' is a grab bag of what one doesn't
| like these days, rather than any really meaningful group.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Wikipedia and the other outlets described as 'left-
| leaning' are neoliberal institutions.
|
| What exactly do you think 'neoliberal' means?
|
| I do agree Wikipedia is not 'left-leaning', mainly
| because 'right' and 'left' are bullshit names that don't
| mean anything. But it doesn't even have the power to act
| in a situation that would make it neoliberal.
| Matl wrote:
| Neoliberal as in prominent decision makers/editors etc,
| such as Jimmy Wales express the sort of free market and
| foreign policy philosophy that has been mainstream since
| about the 80s.
|
| It means that entries on individuals, countries etc. are
| broadly in line with what you'd read in any mainstream
| media outlet and so is its outlook on 'Western
| civilization'.
|
| That doesn't mean it's not a good project, or that it has
| some great power, just that its 'gatekeepers' are not
| exactly dissidents of any sort.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > express the sort of free market and foreign policy
| philosophy that has been mainstream since about the 80s
|
| Let's see:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
|
| Right on the introduction it clearly says that any
| argument based on the curve is pseudo-science.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus
|
| Is biased in claiming the consensus is a contentious
| topic, instead of only a tiny well founded minority ever
| supporting it. But it's the same bias you will see in any
| history book.
|
| If we go extreme in another direction, this one has the
| same bias of representing fringe views as equally
| represented in a debate:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
|
| If we go here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_science
|
| There's a clear neoliberal bias. But if instead we go
| here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_administration
|
| There's a strong modernist bias, with a secondary
| classical liberal one. What is about exactly the same
| bias you would see on the main literature of both
| subjects.
|
| So, no, except for behaving like an encyclopedia and
| reflecting the literature biases, I fail to see how the
| wiki is neoliberal as a whole.
| Matl wrote:
| > What is about exactly the same bias you would see on
| the main literature of both subjects.
|
| I think you just answered your own question.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Why do out single out the neoliberal one if each subject
| clearly has a different bias?
| napkinartist wrote:
| It absolutely does. It's full of editorial decisions.
| What content is on there, what is cut. What editors
| consider germane, etc.
|
| It can absolutely act in a way that makes it neoliberal.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > aren't these the people that would want the ability to
| disseminate information in the face of fascism?
|
| Everybody wants free speech -- but only for opinions they
| agree with. And they are against censorship -- unless the
| "right people" are censored.
|
| Recently, the left has been far more authoritarian,
| labeling everything they don't like as "far right hate
| speech", pushing to make dissent illegal, and demanding
| censorship. I guess the pendulum will swing the other way
| eventually.
|
| It's not really a left VS right issue, but an authoritarian
| one. Free speech can be uncomfortable, that is the point.
| "Free speech, but..." does not work.
| toraway wrote:
| > Recently, the left has been far more authoritarian
|
| I'm not sure how a reasonable comparison of authoritarian
| behavior seemingly assigns more weight to random
| Wikipedia contributors lumped together as "leftists"
| compared to the literal government currently controlled
| by the right that is routinely threatening to pull FCC
| licenses for critical speech among other intentionally
| speech chilling threats.
|
| I'd say the pendulum has already swung the other way,
| while swinging much, much further and more openly than
| nebulous mob demands for "cancel culture", over zealous
| Twitter moderation of hate speech or whatever else the
| previous go-to examples for the left were. Before 2025
| showed what a truly authoritarian anti-free speech policy
| looks like when wielded by those with actual legal power
| and zero shame.
| timeon wrote:
| > That... seems extremely irrelevant.
|
| I find it pretty relevant who is behind what.
| monerozcash wrote:
| > Once they finally have a solid court order to seize domains,
| generally the rate at which they get seized accelerates
| greatly.
|
| Given that most ccTLDs live in different jurisdictions, that's
| not really a huge problem.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Given that most ccTLDs live in different jurisdictions,
| that's not really a huge problem.
|
| The copyright-industrial complex is internationally very
| well-connected.
| monerozcash wrote:
| That may be, but you can't just keep going to the same US
| court for warrants.
| goku12 wrote:
| As long as there is centralization, there is always an
| avenue for abuse with money. The DNS root itself is
| heavily influenced by a group of allied nations, through
| the ICANN if I'm right. That can be used to exert
| pressure on TLD registries, including ccTLD registries.
| Of course, that cannot be used for surgical control
| single domains like Anna's Archives'. But DNS blocking is
| an old technique by now. The copyright cartel needs to
| get it banned only in a few populous countries to destroy
| the value of a domain. We can keep finding workarounds.
| But at some point, they won't have to worry about people
| who can actually do that.
| monerozcash wrote:
| For what it's worth, that doesn't seem to ever have
| worked.
| flipped wrote:
| Better have a .onion. It's almost impossible to seize and you
| control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER, not some for-profit
| registrar. Onions should be the default, it's secure (you own
| the keys), decentralized and far better than relying on CAs for
| encryption.
| sanskritical wrote:
| Tor and I2P are great technologies. ZLibrary, for example,
| runs an excellent Tor hidden service and it is usually the
| most reliable way to access news from the site. However, this
| did not remain true for a while when two of the operators
| were arrested. Tor and I2P require you to have infrastructure
| online. The point of "check Wikipedia for news" is that you
| can have something persist even if you do not have your
| servers online. Nostr is the best technology available in
| this category.
|
| > It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys.
| YOU ARE THE OWNER
|
| This also remains true for Nostr.
|
| But furthermore, as an operator of several Tor hidden
| services corresponding to public web services. I can assure
| you that many users, especially those on mobile devices, will
| stop using your service in large numbers if you direct them
| to a hidden service. iPhones don't allow background processes
| without special dispensation from Apple so the Tor/I2P
| circuit dies every time someone switches between apps. It's
| also an extreme development challenge, as they don't allow
| subprocesses either, and then of course your app will have to
| abide by the GPL at least for I2P (nonstarter for some).
| "Just ruin your experience for all iOS users and switch to
| the GPL for all your client code" is not a realistic
| suggestion. Not that Annas-Archive has a their own client
| app.
| flipped wrote:
| Operational excellence is of course dependent on the
| operator but I would still think it's far easier to bring
| up onion as it's disposable and works behind NAT'ed VMs
| which makes it further easy to run.
|
| I don't know anything about Nostr since it does not focus
| on anonymity and isn't as old as Tor (more than 2 decades
| of research and application), I wouldn't rely on Nostr for
| anything serious.
| fragmede wrote:
| Laundering the code through OpenAI to see if the GPL sticks
| through training, would make for an interesting court case
| if you asked ChatGPT to write an I2P clients "from scratch"
| for a closed source iOS client.
| weslleyskah wrote:
| If they can't figure it out anything else, I think Tor is
| the most plausible tech to be used. What are the
| alternatives if these other services don't provide enough
| traffic to sustent the download speed of the files?
| Something old like USENET certainly can't be used anymore.
|
| I hope they follow the same pathway of The Pirate Bay or
| Rutracker.
| quietsegfault wrote:
| I'll never use Tor because I have no idea what the Tor client
| is actually doing. Is it enabling someone to use my network
| connection for cybercrime without my knowledge? No thanks.
| dmantis wrote:
| Clients are never used as relays in TOR. You never route
| anyone's traffic until you setup it yourself. And you can't
| miss that part, and it's not a default, and requires
| additional configuration.
|
| Also relays (not exit nodes) are pretty safe to operate and
| running them is a decent thing, supporting free internet
| instead of a corporate ads machine, let's not frame it as a
| "crime support".
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _Also relays (not exit nodes) are pretty safe to
| operate and running them is a decent thing, supporting
| free internet instead of a corporate ads machine, let 's
| not frame it as a "crime support"._
|
| Well the purpose of using Tor is to prevent any network
| operators from knowing who you're talking to. Which AIUI
| is primarily a concern if either you're not allowed to
| talk to whoever ("great firewall" type things), or you
| risk getting in trouble for talking to whoever (Silk Road
| etc, or disfavored politics).
|
| I guess if you're worried about hacks and doxxing rather
| than LE? Or if you only call things crime when they
| _should be_ illegal rather than when they formally are?
| flipped wrote:
| LE relies on opsec failures which is very clear on their
| busts. They are incompetent hypocrite fools.
| reorder9695 wrote:
| Using Tor browser and running a Tor node are different
| things, by using the browser you are not contributing to
| the network, you're just accessing it. If you're worried
| about someone using your network connection for cybercrime
| you shouldn't run a Tor node (although there is
| significantly less risk with a relay node), but you
| shouldn't worry about using regular Tor.
| flipped wrote:
| > by using the browser you are not contributing to the
| networK
|
| That's false to some extent. Tor's promise comes from
| it's vast population of users. The more users it has, the
| better it is to improve everyone's anonymity. So in a
| way, even by using it, you are helping Tor network. And
| please, save the "criminal" bs (meant for the original
| comment).
| coldtea wrote:
| This response stretches "pedantic correction" to new
| levels.
| lxgr wrote:
| Why? The utility of any network grows with the number of
| participants, even that of inherently asymmetric networks
| that strictly distinguish "producers" and "consumers".
| (More eyeballs make the network more valuable to content
| providers.)
|
| This might not be how courts determine culpability of
| redistributing any potentially illegal content, of
| course.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _This might not be how courts determine culpability of
| redistributing any potentially illegal content, of
| course._
|
| Which is precisely the point of this discussion.
|
| Might as well argue "By protecting the environment you're
| supporting the drug trade, because people that a climate
| catastrophe would wipe out will be able to be drug
| users".
| flipped wrote:
| It's literally outline by Tor Project team, if you care
| to even read from official sources.
| coldtea wrote:
| This here response continues to stretch "pedantic
| correction" to new levels.
|
| What's "literally outlined" I'd guess is that the utility
| of the Tor network increases with adoption which nobody
| ever doubted.
|
| What is discard is the tenuous over-stretched argument in
| this thread regarding fears of legality, that went like
| this:
|
| GP: Using Tor browser and running a Tor node are
| different things, by using the browser you are not
| contributing to the network, you're just accessing it.
|
| P: That's false to some extent. Tor's promise comes from
| it's vast population of users. The more users it has, the
| better it is to improve everyone's anonymity. So in a
| way, even by using it, you are helping Tor network.
|
| As if that what was discussed...
| Froztnova wrote:
| Tor doesn't work like this. i2p, however, does. At least by
| default.
| lxgr wrote:
| As others have mentioned, that's not what Tor does by
| default. Just because you don't know how it works doesn't
| mean that it's generally unknowable.
|
| And conversely, it's enough to visit a random website
| running WebTorrent or just a plain HTTP DDoS attack to
| possibly "use your connection for cybercrime".
|
| Since RFC 3514 unfortunately never gained traction,
| distinguishing good, bad, and illegal traffic remains
| difficult.
| xtracto wrote:
| Namecoin has had all the DNS issues fixed since 2011. It is
| one of the few real and useful applications of bitcoin based
| technology.
|
| Somehow it never got too the attention it deserved.
|
| It was also the first known "altcoin"
| flipped wrote:
| Namecoin sounds very promising, first time hearing about
| it.
| superkuh wrote:
| >It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys.
| YOU ARE THE OWNER, not some for-profit registrar.
|
| You may own the keys but the non-profit The Tor Project owns
| the network. And when they decide to shut it down your
| "ownership" of the domain keys doesn't matter in the
| slightest. You might think this is a silly scenario but
| actually it happened in 2021/2022 when the tor project
| unilaterally decided to kill the entire Torv2 network and all
| domains were made inoperable. All links between sites,
| everything that made .onion a web, was lost.
|
| The Tor Project does this whenever they feel that there's a
| security issue. It will happen again.
|
| As someone that spent 10 years building completely legal
| community sites on the .onion network with the delusion of
| ownship it really hurt me. I'm never using .onion again. It
| is not a place to try to build communities. It is _only_ for
| people that need 'security' as a highest priority and don't
| care if everything gets wiped out.
| mantisV3 wrote:
| They didn't provide any migration path from v2 to v3?
| sanskritical wrote:
| They did not. And many apps (Ricochet Messenger comes to
| mind) were not visited by a web browser. So it isn't like
| you could announce an HTTP 302 and just seamlessly
| transition.
| flipped wrote:
| They don't own the network. The people who run the relays
| do. v2 wasn't shutdown in an instant. It was necessary and
| you could have just redirected your users to v3 and tell
| them to use it instead but you had to whine about your
| short-commings on Tor?
|
| It's not only for high-security. It's for the state-of-the-
| art anonymity.
| cassepipe wrote:
| How are we supposed to discover official .onion adresses
| though ? Is there some kind of DNS for that ?
| integralid wrote:
| The same way you discover official clearnet domain names,
| i.e. by using a search engine, getting url from a friend,
| etc.
| supermatt wrote:
| I highly doubt nostr's suitability as a petabyte DFS/CDN.
| sanskritical wrote:
| This is a discussion on whether or not it is better to use it
| to announce new domain names post-suspension than Wikipedia,
| not if it can sustain petabytes of data.
| supermatt wrote:
| Given the archives use of BT, probably better to just use
| BEP-44 on mainline DHT if you want to store an arbitrary
| address somewhere - or use something like IPNS, or .onion
| as others have mentioned.
|
| As nostr relies on gossip, there is no guarantee you will
| have access to latest address.
| sanskritical wrote:
| I am unaware of an app that sees present day use for
| communicating short messages that uses BEP-44 or mainline
| DHT. Nostr works today for millions of people. These
| services have normal people using them, not Hacker News
| commentators that are extremely sophisticated -- imagine
| telling someone who only knows how to use normal web
| services and apps they install from the app store to
| "just retrieve a BEP-44 message from the DHT".
| supermatt wrote:
| I'm not aware of any laypeople who use nostr either.
|
| But if you are going to build some nostr-based "resolver"
| into a browser you could instead use any of the other
| protocols - 2 of which are designed specifically for
| resolution, and the other already having a robust
| resolver implementation built on top of it?
|
| I quite like nostr, but let's not pretend it solves every
| problem.
| dmantis wrote:
| Tor and I2P is a better fit. Nostr is very weird. It sells
| itself as decentralized, but basically all frontends provide
| same several relays.
|
| When those relays get subpoenas and remove your resource,
| you're done. You can use some unknown relays to publish, but
| who's gonna use them as clients outside of the defaults? It's
| effectively designed for shadowbans.
| sanskritical wrote:
| Many clients automatically seek, or prompt an action in 1
| click to retrieve content from additional relays that a Nostr
| pubkey announces if said content is referenced but not
| available on already subscribed relays. As a publisher, you
| announce what relays you are currently publishing to in your
| identity metadata. So even if you don't specifically
| subscribe to a smaller relay, you can still access the
| content on it.
|
| Tor and I2P are great technologies. ZLibrary, for example,
| runs an excellent Tor hidden service and it is _usually_ the
| most reliable way to access news from the site. However, this
| did not remain true for a while when two of the operators
| were arrested. Tor and I2P require you to have infrastructure
| online. The point of "check Wikipedia for news" is that you
| can have something persist even if you do not have your
| servers online. Nostr is the best technology available in
| this category.
| dmantis wrote:
| Where does the nostr pubkey announce it? Let's say you are
| banned from main default relays. Is there any side channel?
| sanskritical wrote:
| You announce all the relays you publish to to the relays
| you are publishing to. If someone quotes your post in a
| post of their own, in many clients subsequent readers
| will be able to retrieve your content from the relays
| which they don't currently follow. Relay discovery
| mechanisms grow progressively better. I don't know of any
| pubkey ever banned from major relays. The operator of
| Damus, one of the more successful clients in history and
| one of the main default relays, openly engages with
| dissident personalities in a welcoming manner. You could
| probably get a "filtering transparency report" from him
| and others and ask if they've blacklisted any specific
| pubkeys and why. I am unaware of any that are currently
| blacklisted, and generally the network seems to defer to
| WoT mechanisms by clients to blacklist content.
|
| Regardless, this remains a far more resilient persistent
| source of information that you don't operate than "check
| Wikipedia".
| dmantis wrote:
| I still don't get how to bypass a theoretical block, you
| need to access at least one of the current major relays
| or a side channel to find a follower, only after that you
| can re-translate the new set of relays. The autosub is
| good, but IMO the current major operators have an Elusive
| Joe situation because nostr is very small. Things will
| change as soon as people with money and government
| connections see it as a problem.
|
| I totally agree with the Wikipedia argument though.
| sanskritical wrote:
| I think relay discovery by clients has improved by leaps
| and bounds and will continue to do so. Previously you had
| to give some complicated "follow me at such and such
| relay" thing. These days you can just tell people your
| npub and things seem to "just work". I don't know what's
| going on under the hood, I can only say that clients
| figuring out which relays have content seems to have
| improved drastically.
| cxplay wrote:
| Check NIP-65[1], this is the key to the latest Nostr
| client's automatic discovery feature.
|
| [1] https://nips.nostr.com/65
| hypeatei wrote:
| Tor, sure. i2p requires some proxy config in your browser and
| you need to run a service in the background explicitly. I
| wish they'd release a dedicated client like Tor does.
| yapyap wrote:
| Pretty sure the whole concept of i2p is that every user
| also contributes to the network, which is why the config
| hypeatei wrote:
| I'm not sure why that would require more friction or why
| my comment was downvoted: i2p is harder to use than Tor.
| Adoption will be hindered by it, even in tech circles. I
| want to fire up an executable and maybe click through one
| prompt but not have to remember all the configuration
| steps the next time I want to use i2p.
| dmantis wrote:
| They work on that, https://geti2p.net/el/blog/post/2025/1
| 0/16/new-i2p-routers
|
| The current focus are new rust and go implementations,
| but embedding lib for applications is also in the
| roadmap.
|
| I also agree on hindrance. I don't understand why they
| don't provide a simple docker-compose at least for daemon
| deployment for immutable management with controlled
| scopes. There is an image in the dockerhub, but no proper
| instructions. People have to spend several hours to
| ensure that everything works correctly.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Both require daemons that offer SOCKS (other other
| protocols) proxies for browsers to route through.
|
| If you're talking about the Tor Browser bundle, I2P has
| this: https://geti2p.net/en/download/easyinstall
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| There's always Freenet...
| flipped wrote:
| Freenet is promising but it's not even fully done.
| Experimental stage. I am also skeptic of their more usage
| of LLM generated code these days.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Freenet (aka Hyphanet) is 25 years old... it's been
| "stable" for decades. Biggest problem is that content is
| sort-of hosted locally and considering how much child
| porn and other criminal content is in its darker corners
| tha can be risky.
|
| It's also incredibly slow.
| donohoe wrote:
| There is nothing stopping anyone here from registering a new
| shiny .org domain (or any tld) and pointing it to Anna's Archives
| name servers.
| 47282847 wrote:
| Except they are probably not set up to respond to new domain
| names and generate HTTPS certificates for them.
| pkal wrote:
| Some sites like Anna's Archive have .onion site for the Tor
| network, and others do not. Is there a considerable downside
| (DDOS?) to providing access to their site by those means?
| flipped wrote:
| I have seen Tor network take a hit when there's fight between
| darknet marketplaces. It's certainly an issue.
| m00dy wrote:
| not anymore. Most recent onion sites have enabled proof-of-
| work mechanism in place, so DDoS attacks are now expensive to
| carry out.
| flipped wrote:
| I am aware of POW but that hasn't stopped the DDoS. If you
| look at chart from few months back, there was significant
| hit due to crazy DDoS carried out by DrugHub which was
| evident in a Dread post.
| m00dy wrote:
| link the chart here, so I can take a look.
| flipped wrote:
| https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-
| country.html look at the spikes.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I remember swapping lists of IP addresses of FTP servers ~1990
| when there was no DNS/Domains in Germany working on the internet.
| qingcharles wrote:
| There was very little DNS in the early days. I just had big
| notepads full of IPs next to the computer. Especially for the
| pirate sites.
| luckys wrote:
| https://annas-archive.li/ works and there's a few alternatives
| listed at the bottom of the page
| OvbiousError wrote:
| Doesn't work where I live, is the block on a country level?
| Tepix wrote:
| Try using the DNS4EU resolver, see https://www.joindns4.eu/
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Blocked here too and all alternatives.
| arowthway wrote:
| Excuse my FUD, but are they really non-profit as described in
| FAQ? I find it a little hard to believe given how aggressive they
| are at marketing the paid version.
| squigz wrote:
| This kind of implies a legitimacy that AA just doesn't have.
| They're not 'a' non-profit, and there's simply no way to know
| that they're not taking in loads of money and pocketing it.
| chrisjj wrote:
| > They're not 'a' non-profit
|
| How do you know?
|
| > and there's simply no way to know that they're not taking
| in loads of money and pocketing it.
|
| Or that they are, right?
| tokai wrote:
| They are not a non-profit because they are not a registered
| company/organization.
| chrisjj wrote:
| There is no requirement for a non-profit organisation to
| be registered.
| tokai wrote:
| There is. Without a legal framework its just an
| association that claims not to make a profit. This is all
| word games though as be clearly don't agree on the
| definition of a non-profit organization.
| chrisjj wrote:
| > There is.
|
| No. In UK, many an unregistered association is a non-
| profit e.g. sports clubs, volunteer groups, societies.
| krick wrote:
| In UK there is simply no such status as "non-profit", so
| technically none of what you listed are "non-profit"
| organizations. These are unincorporated associations,
| that, by the way, can be making profit (but that would be
| on shaky grounds, since common law makes it hard not to
| fuck up, being as vague as it always is). However, there
| is a "charity" status in UK, and you'd have be a
| registered organization to obtain it.
|
| Anyway, "non-profit" is (i.e. "only makes sense defined
| as...") a legal status, it isn't just a way to say "not
| making money" (after all, we wouldn't call any failing
| business a non-profit, right?), so it really doesn't make
| any sense to ask if an illegal underground gang is "non-
| profit". GP is correct to point that out.
| chrisjj wrote:
| > In UK there is simply no such status as "non-profit"
|
| Incorrect.
|
| ---------
|
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/non-
| prof...
|
| noun [ C ]
|
| uk /,nan'praf.It/ us /,na:n'pra:.fIt/
|
| (also not-for-profit)
|
| an organization whose aim is to make money for a social
| or political purpose or to provide a service that people
| need, rather than to make a profit
|
| (Definition of non-profit from the Cambridge Advanced
| Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus (c) Cambridge University
| Press)
|
| ---------
|
| That's Cambridge _UK_.
|
| > However, there is a "charity" status in UK, and you'd
| have be a registered organization to obtain it.
|
| Again incorrect.
|
| See https://www.gov.uk/setting-up-charity
| squigz wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure what this sort of pedantry is meant
| to accomplish. Congratulations on being technically
| correct, I suppose?
|
| Both I and GP have pointed out the crux of the matter,
| and you are ignoring it.
| squigz wrote:
| When people talk about a "non profit" entity, they are
| almost certainly referring to a legal non-profit. Maybe
| that's not what GP meant.
|
| And yes, you are technically correct in that there's no
| way to know that they are or are not pulling in money and
| pocketing it. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the
| questions asked but okay.
| chrisjj wrote:
| > When people talk about a "non profit" entity, they are
| almost certainly referring to a legal non-profit.
|
| In UK, a non-profit association does not have to be
| legally registered to be legal.
| jbstack wrote:
| As someone who runs a charity, it surprises me how often people
| equate "non-profit" with "doesn't get paid" or "does everything
| for free". Non-profits still need money, they just don't use
| that money to make profit that is paid to shareholders.
| Instead, they use the money to further the stated objectives of
| the organisation.
|
| NB: I'm not trying to imply anything about whether Anna's
| Archive is non-profit or not. Just that the fact that it
| aggressively tries to raise money isn't a relevant factor.
| tokai wrote:
| They provide LLM data sets for 'donations'. They collect other
| open collections and beg for paid memberships to access pirated
| material. Its a russian project. You can for sure assume that
| someone is earning something somewhere.
| WadeGrimridge wrote:
| they should've released the spotify dump anonymously
| chrisjj wrote:
| That would lose the PR advantage.
| gpm wrote:
| Isn't Anna's Archive already run anonymously? So they sort of
| did...
| m00dy wrote:
| so every .org domain is now subject to US law system ?
| KomoD wrote:
| Of course they are? PIR is American.
| ebcase wrote:
| Yes, and they always have been.
| reorder9695 wrote:
| I always wonder why sites like Anna's Archive (and a lot of
| torrent tracker sites) don't provide .onion addresses. I imagine
| a significant proportion of their traffic comes from the Tor
| network, and onion addresses don't have this same weakness that
| regular DNS addresses have as they're just the key. I can't
| imagine if they have the servers already up and running, running
| an .onion address is that much more work considering the
| resilience it would add and it's existence may even encourage
| users to access through Tor if they promote it as the primary
| address.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| If they're going to have .onion and .p2p addresses, they should
| also add Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil is easier to have always running
| in the background so I don't have to toggle it on just to
| access AA.
|
| EDIT: Never mind, I forgot how the Tor software works. I still
| think also having Yggdrasil would be nice, though.
| mmooss wrote:
| How do you access Yggdrasil? .onion addresses require
| downloading a web browser.
| tremon wrote:
| I access .onion addresses from the same browser I'm typing
| this comment in. You need a Tor proxy, but other than that
| it's regular http traffic.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| Oh I forgot that running Tor doesn't automatically route
| traffic through it. My mistake, sorry.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| Yggdrasil provides an IPv6 address in a formerly reserved
| and therefore unused block, so you just run Yggdrasil and
| visit the IPv6 address.
| mmooss wrote:
| How do you run Yggdrasil? Explain it like I'm an end-user
| who has no idea what IP is, much less IPv6.
|
| My point is, how many users would have access to
| something on Yggdrasil? How many could - what skill is
| required?
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| Fair, it's not end-user-ready. But they should support
| it; it's a cool platform and it doesn't take much work to
| set up on their end.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Onion/Tor has horrendous latency and throughput. Latency is
| bearable, but dial-up speeds for downloading can drive one
| insane.
| integralid wrote:
| But you can share torrent links via onion hidden service
| easily.
| adrianN wrote:
| It has been a few years since I last used Tor, but even back
| then you could download at megabit speeds over the network. I
| would assume that the situation has improved, I'm surprised
| that you seem to report the opposite.
| cakealert wrote:
| This wasn't even true 10 years ago...
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| The speeds are usually bad because exit nodes are more rare.
| But Onion addresses don't go through an exit, and stay within
| the Tor network.
| xd1936 wrote:
| Or IPFS/IPNS
|
| https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/ipns/
| KomoD wrote:
| alternative tlds you can visit: .se .li .pm .in
| jimmydoe wrote:
| It might be a sincere effort in the beginning, but at this point,
| Anna is merely AI company's foot soldier.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Which - now that the various commercial LLM companies have
| harvested the archive, they will be more than happy to use
| litigation to raise the drawbridge behind them, so as to block
| any future competitors from acquiring the same training data...
| jimmydoe wrote:
| That would be a very interesting and ironic timeline.
| mmooss wrote:
| Do you mean, intentionally? It's an interesting question; is
| there any evidence?
| lkbm wrote:
| They do have this section about supplying AI data:
| https://annas-archive.se/llm
|
| I certainly don't consider taking money from AI companies
| while giving data to everyone else for free makes them AI
| company footsoldiers, but that offer is presumably what's
| being alluded to.
| mmooss wrote:
| It gives AI companies influence, if they supply a
| significant amount of AA's budget. It also may give AI
| companies knowledge of AA's people and assets that could be
| given to authorities.
| jimmydoe wrote:
| Not sure intention but stating the de facto state from my
| observation.
| hashstring wrote:
| We love you Anna!
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I don't understand the premise. .ORG was never a safe-haven TLD
| in terms of abuse protection. Juicy apple falls from tree, story
| at 11?
| jszymborski wrote:
| thepiratebay.org is still up
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| They could also potentially write their latest address to the
| Ethereum blockchain instead, assuming there is a client that
| could scan and resolve. This would be bulletproof.
|
| _Nation-state hackers deliver malware from "bulletproof"
| blockchains_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45860258 -
| November 2025
| jszymborski wrote:
| They really ought to get an .onion site up.
| goku12 wrote:
| Well! Not really a surprise, is it? We knew that DNS censorship
| was coming sooner or later. The real surprise is that it lasted
| so long. X509 (TLS) PKI is also probably being abused right now.
| We know how differently the administration sees services like
| these that are actually beneficial to humanity. Choosing to rely
| on services like DNS and PKI exclusively for the function they
| provide is a very bad idea going forward for us normies.
|
| We should have considered these centralized and corporate driven
| core infrastructure components as interim measures while more
| independent alternatives were being developed. We have a few
| different alternatives right now. Can't we just choose one and
| switch over? (something not based on blockchains.) Something like
| GNU Name System, may be?
|
| PS: They will probably block the IP if Server hold/DNS block is
| not useful anymore. That's a different problem though.
| flipped wrote:
| Tor and monero will save the world.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| Tor yes. I even recall seeing a rare use of blockchain for
| domain names (Namecoin) over a decade ago. But I don't see
| how Monero helps?
| flipped wrote:
| Financial freedom and private transactions. It's also mined
| on consumer hardware making it far more decentralized than
| bitcoin.
| tavavex wrote:
| I wonder if in the interim period between DNS blocks and full
| IP bans, some websites will start distributing their IP
| addresses directly as the "official" way to connect to them.
| rurban wrote:
| Just add the censored IP's to your /etc/hosts file, and don't
| care.
| cramcgrab wrote:
| Don't copy that floppy!
| jacquesm wrote:
| Piracy is killing music.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| You wouldn't download a car.
|
| (I mean: You wouldn't steal a car. :-) ).
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| That was always such a silly argument, even more so with
| the rise of cheap and reliable 3D printing. I download,
| print, and use physical objects every week and don't know
| or care what IP issues might exist as long as it works for
| its purpose. I can't wait until the day comes when you can
| download and print a working car at home.
| kvemkon wrote:
| But such working cars from home will not be certified to
| participate at the public traffic and remain toys for
| driving on own private property.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Streaming is killing music piracy. The scene is a shell of
| its former self.
| mastermedo wrote:
| I still remember the hiatus around the pirate bay . org going
| down back in the day. They updated the landing page on the
| alternative domains to include a hydra above the pirate ship
| where above each hydra head there was a domain name[1]. I thought
| that was a great comeback by the maintainers.
|
| [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-pirate-bay-has-a-new-
| log...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Those guys should get a prize for resilience alone, they put
| many government run services to shame. The only thing all this
| legal stuff seems to have done is to harden them even further.
| ddingus wrote:
| Such great moves!
|
| On their way down, the original creators made sure The Pirate
| Bay would continue to be that gift that keeps on giving.
| physicles wrote:
| If anyone hasn't heard it, the podcast Darknet Diaries
| episode 92 (2021-05-11) is a great listen.
| guelo wrote:
| Do not go there without ublock! The ads on there,
| especially porn ads, have gotten out of control. Who is it
| that's making money off of thepiratebay these days?
| lr1970 wrote:
| <sarcasm> I thought that Anthropic and OpenAI created precedents
| that legitimize libgen and Anna archive. They pillaged all the
| books and scientific papers from those archives and got away with
| it. Why not the rest of us? </sarcasm>
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > got away with it
|
| Anthropic paid a settlement of $1 500 000 000 to authors.
| wswope wrote:
| Doesn't really mean much until individuals can also sacrifice
| a small percentage of their ARR to completely ignore IP law.
|
| I'd take that deal, but until it becomes and option, we have
| a clearly broken system. Rules for thee; not for me, etc.
| nostrademons wrote:
| They can: VPNs.
| wswope wrote:
| Fair point, but I think the Pinkertons would be at my
| door within the hour if I started re-appropriating the
| art style of Studio Ghibli or Disney for commercial
| profit.
| dmix wrote:
| People always say this like the tech industry wasn't
| culturally anti-copyright and pro-creative commons before.
| Those same people probably work at Meta and Anthropic, just
| like Google's book project which got them in trouble.
| wswope wrote:
| > People always say this like the tech industry wasn't
| culturally anti-copyright and pro-creative commons
| before.
|
| I completely agree with that. The problem is that the
| current system is such that only billion dollar players
| can flout the rules, while everyone else is left in the
| dust.
|
| Worst of both worlds IMO.
| dmix wrote:
| Others already mentioned they lost their lawsuit. Should
| the fines have killed Anthropic? Would have been more
| fair and a less bad world?
|
| Why not focus energy on being anti-aggressive copyright
| in general. These system won't ever be fair. It's just
| rent seeking enabled by the government and some people
| can afford the rent.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| To pick a nit: Technically Anthropic didn't loose any
| lawsuit or pay any fine. They came to an agreement with
| the authors to pay them a $1,5 billion settlement. Which
| was a lot of money per book.
| votepaunchy wrote:
| And a lot more expensive per book than buying,
| digitizing, and destroying the physical copy. Which was
| ruled legal.
| wswope wrote:
| You're talking past me for no real reason, mate. That's
| precisely the point I'm making.
|
| Young Carlos thinks it matters that Anthropic got sued
| when they can keep flouting the rules anyway, and I
| disagree: it's not a fair system until we ditch the rent-
| seeking entirely.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| They paid one of the largest settlements in world
| history. Should I guess that hackers are only satisfied
| with the public execution of the company leadership?
| asveikau wrote:
| Wasn't the Google project scanning physical books and not
| distributing them externally? That seems like a very
| different thing than torrenting or even downloading stuff
| uploaded by a third party.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Why the negativity? You can also as an individual do the
| same as Anthropic and get sued for billions. You have that
| option, don't let anybody hold you back!
| dehrmann wrote:
| Be careful not to confuse using the material and distributing
| it. There are open legal cases sorting out what fair use means
| for generative AI. Distribution (seeding in the case of
| torrents) of this material isn't legal. It got Meta in trouble,
| and it's getting Anna's archive in trouble.
| jacquesm wrote:
| If anything this is a very strong argument for a completely
| decentralized domain name system.
|
| The DNS is much too fragile in light of all of the recent
| developments.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > If anything this is a very strong argument for a completely
| decentralized domain name system.
|
| As you probably know, this is a very old idea, dating back
| almost from the birth of bitcoin [1] [2].
|
| Real shame it didn't take off.
|
| [1] https://www.namecoin.org/ [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin
| oybng wrote:
| knowledge for me but not for thee
| ur-whale wrote:
| Funny how HN is usually ripe with folks crawling out of the
| woodwork to defend IP ownership as a fundamentally important
| principle, both on moral and economic grounds.
|
| Yet, as of 08:37:36 MST Monday, 5 January 2026 there isn't a
| single comment on this thread complaining about Anna's IP theft.
|
| Don't get me wrong, that makes me _VERY_ happy, I am a firm
| believer that the very notion of IP ownership needs to die a
| horrible death, something that AI may very well make happen in
| short order, yay.
|
| But still, I can't help but wonder why the "this is IP theft"
| crowd is completely silent when it comes to the like of pirate
| bay and Anna.
| acoustics wrote:
| > I am a firm believer that the very notion of IP ownership
| needs to die a horrible death, something that AI may very well
| make happen in short order, yay.
|
| The leading AI labs are not killing IP. They are taking IP and
| reshaping/combining it to produce their own highly lucrative
| proprietary IP package which they sell to you.
|
| The mirror image of IP defenders are AI boosters who argue
| against IP when it comes to slurping up media but squirm when
| you say "ok, then publish all of the inputs that go into making
| your frontier models, and publish the model weights too."
| tavavex wrote:
| > the very notion of IP ownership needs to die a horrible
| death, something that AI may very well make happen in short
| order, yay
|
| I agree with the disdain for IP, especially with what it had
| grown to become nowadays. But while I was also initially
| optimistic that AI companies may find a way to make IP go away
| as a byproduct of their activities, now it seems more like the
| big businesses will cut deals with one another and leave us
| commoners with nothing. Entertainment megacorps and AI
| companies rule the world, and I have no doubts that they'd find
| a way to become close allies. The AI companies get their near-
| endless stream of training data, the entertainment industry
| gets a cut of that juicy AI money and gives away their data
| willingly, while the IP remains locked away from ordinary
| people for eons more, just the way they like it. No one but us
| wants IP reform, or at least no one with real power, so it will
| probably never happen.
| squigz wrote:
| Possibly because context matters to many people.
|
| AA is not stealing every byte of data they can get in order to
| make billions of dollars, collect personal data about people,
| and then sell that for even more money.
| amatecha wrote:
| This happened a couple days ago, not "a few hours ago". I was
| surprised torrentfreak hadn't posted about it at the time --
| maybe took them a while to notice? I tried to hit the site on Jan
| 2nd, 10:40pm pacific timezone, and the domain was inaccessible
| then.
| dangus wrote:
| Surprise to who exactly? Anna's Archive has been one of the most
| blatant piracy outlets to come around since the days of Napster.
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