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Comment by raybb 19 hours ago

I have been volunteering with the Internet Archive via Open Library for about half a decade now. Sending money is awesome and they're also always looking for volunteers! There are so many projects going on for Open Library and staff has quite a few volunteers but right now especially I think it would be awesome to have a few more experienced folks joining to help (many volunteers are students).

Here's just a few things we could use more experienced folks to help on:

- Solr performance, it currently gets quite slow under load and there are two read replicas but we think there may be some ways to improve it besides adding more replicas. You can run a full production copy of solr based on the dumps... But the current workflow to do this is kinda broke so I had AI fix it up but we haven't been able to verify if it's a fully working/good solution.

- We're doing big redesigns of major parts of the frontend. If your down to help for that Lokesh had many tickets open and guidelines and welcomes PRs.

- I'm currently migrating us from web.py to fastapi and could certainly use more experienced help for trickier ones.

Anyway, if you're actually willing to help all you gotta do is join our community call tomorrow at 9am PST and share your interests. We'll you on to something you like quickly :)

https://docs.openlibrary.org/everyone/community-call.html#co...

Comment by b40d-48b2-979e 14 hours ago

I'm curious, why a BDFL framework like FastAPI over Litestar or a different, performant language altogether?

Comment by raybb 14 hours ago

Not another language because the performance issues are limited to the code being sync. Anyway, a gradual migration was a must as well.

This is the first I hear of Litestar and I think it does seem very values aligned. I fastapi was picked simply because it was already known by the team and had a very thriving ecosystem. That being said, the hard part is getting off the old sync web.py stuff. Once everything is in async land moving to another framework if needed is relatively trivial. Thanks for sharing that though I'll keep an eye on it!

Comment by zplizzi 9 hours ago

I’ve been using litestar for loads of projects recently and have been loving it. The ability to have full request/response typing (and openapi spec autogeneration) with your favorite dataclass framework is quite nice (I use attrs). I didn’t want to be forced to use pydantic like some other frameworks do.

Comment by T3RMINATED 7 minutes ago

[dead]

Comment by zetanor 1 day ago

I like the theory of the IA enough that I have a reoccurring donation, but I've thought a few times about e-mailing them to cancel (they have to halt your monthly donation charges manually). There's plenty of things I can overlook, like having to compete with scrapers to get a single page to load, or a myriad of longstanding technical issues (my favorite being that the collection upload system silently and irrevocably leaks your e-mail address: https://archive.org/post/240444/help-to-hide-email (2009)). What's a lot harder to overlook is that the IA brazenly hosts warez on clearnet and pulls off stunts like the COVID "emergency library".

I'm all for ending copyright, but does any of that really need to be linked with the Wayback Machine? Huge chunks of the Web have been displaced or snuffed by social media and gen AI, making Wayback a unique(ly valuable) source of information and history. It's not my call, but it seems strange to risk it as a motte for the bailey of copyright abolition activism. What happens when some stick-up-the-ass company—whose stuff is probably in hundreds of different collections—decides it really wants a payday?

Comment by spenczar5 22 hours ago

> What happens when some stick-up-the-ass company—whose stuff is probably in hundreds of different collections—decides it really wants a payday?

It's happened:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachette_v._Internet_Archive

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Music_Group_v._Inter...

Comment by frenchtoast8 22 hours ago

How much did IA spend on legal fees, employee time, etc in their defense of the COVID emergency library that most people thought was a lost cause? I need to know where my donation dollars are going.

Comment by addy34 8 hours ago

Tax filings are available here:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...

        Rev.  Costs(all)  Legal
  -----------------------------
  2019   37       37        0.2   
  2020   22       20        0.4
  2021   30       25        2.0
  2022   31       26        1.8
  2023   24       33        1.0
  2024   27       24        2.2

USD millions. Legal is non-employee costs.

Comment by nijave 40 minutes ago

Are there on staff lawyers hiding in payroll or do they contract everything?

Comment by bee_rider 20 hours ago

Have they pulled many other “stunts” like the COVID library? It was a pretty crazy time, I think we shouldn’t judge things done then too harshly.

Comment by wolvoleo 18 hours ago

I don't think they have.

I also hated that stunt. It undermined their mission, damaged all their goodwill and caused legal hassle. And all the while all these books were readily available to anyone who wanted them via Anna's etc.

They should have stayed on the right side of that line.

Comment by zetanor 12 hours ago

The COVID library wasn't even the first time they had book lending on the Archive. I remember at least a couple of different prior borrowing mechanisms. But besides books, JS/WASM emulators were added a long time ago to run game console ROMs directly in the browser on any collection that happens to contain them. There's probably other examples, but nothing else comes to mind right now.

Comment by kwarcode 17 hours ago

former Tory minister spotted

Comment by mitxela 15 hours ago

What's wrong with hosting warez exactly? Or the COVID emergency library? Do you think they're actually bad things to do, or are you just worried about the legal risk? If the latter, you should keep donating until you find someone who's doing the same thing with less risk.

Comment by Aurornis 12 hours ago

They’re legally indefensible and are an existential threat to the entire organization.

The reason many of us donate is for the internet archiving part of the business. When an organization starts taking donations and doing other things with them, including things that actively threaten the existence of the thing you were trying to support, it’s reasonable to stop donating.

Comment by mitxela 12 hours ago

Will stopping donating result in more or less archiving?

Comment by Aurornis 9 hours ago

When a donation-dependent organization starts losing people over its mission, the board takes notice and adjusts course. Unless they're so far gone that they don't care about taking down the organization to pursue activist side quests, in which case donations don't matter.

Comment by coryrc 10 hours ago

More, if it causes the organization to change course and avoid being sued into oblivion.

Comment by throwaway2037 5 hours ago

    > I'm all for ending copyright

I don't understand this sadly, common sentiment on HN. How will authors and artists that produce copyrightable artefacts earn income via royalties without strong copyright laws? Are there any highly developed nations that have abandoned copyright? Or any that have weak/non-existent copyright laws and thriving arts and letters? I doubt it.

Comment by 8 hours ago

Comment by theletterf 1 day ago

Be careful: paying with Google Pay is extremely easy and the default setting is monthly recurrence. If you're not logged in, the only way to cancel (as far as I know) is by sending an email, which is incredibly precarious.

Comment by MaxLeiter 1 day ago

Worth noting the 2:1 match is only for recurring donations. The graphic does not mention that

> When you start a recurring donation of $25 or more in September, your initial gift will be matched 2:1.

Comment by jeltz 1 day ago

Any rules for how quickly you can cancel one and it still counts as recurring?

Comment by w4yai 1 day ago

You can go to play store subscriptions and cancel there right ?

Comment by Bratmon 21 hours ago

Google Pay and Google Play are completely separate products that might as well be from different companies

Comment by theletterf 1 day ago

Not if Google Pay has been used as the transaction agent. It's not a Google Play subscription.

Comment by jrflowers 1 day ago

https://support.google.com/paymentscenter/answer/9003237?hl=...

Comment by ButlerianJihad 21 hours ago

I can confirm that the Google Payments Center has all my transactions and recurring payments. This is more than included in the Google Play interface.

For example, I have a Pixel Care+ subscription, billed monthly. I can manage and cancel that subscription. Same for Google One, billed annually, and an in-app subscription (links out to Google Play). Can change payment methods, add or remove a backup method, etc.

So, if you did set up a recurring donation through Google Pay, go to payments.google.com (on a desktop system) and see whether it can be managed through the web interface there. You'll need to verify your account.

PayPal has also offered good tools to manage recurring payments and subscriptions. If you set up payments through PayPal then you should be able to modify or cancel them, without even involving the payee.

Comment by John7878781 1 day ago

in those situations, especially if the business is unresponsive, i just keep charging back until they stop. if i can subscribe easily, i should be able to cancel just as easily :)

Comment by coldpie 1 day ago

IA is responsive. I had to cancel my donation earlier this year due to some financial circumstances and it was a quick and easy email.

However I believe they have an easy cancel button if your donation is associated with an IA account, too.

Comment by theletterf 1 day ago

Well, you can't if you paid using a debit card, like I did. Silly me.

Comment by Melatonic 1 day ago

You often still can actually. Call your bank

Comment by theletterf 1 day ago

Just did. Not possible in Spain.

Comment by embedding-shape 1 day ago

Which bank? My main bank (I'm also in Spain) is BBVA which is able to do charge backs with my debit cards as well. Was possible with Banc Sabadell I used to have as well, really strange to hear there is a bank that doesn't support that today with debit cards.

Comment by eis 1 day ago

Debit cards can do chargebacks just as credit cards can do. That's a feature of Visa and Mastercard (and others). If your bank refuses, complain to the card network. Oh and consider changing banks, that's really unacceptable in 2026 and shows an anti customer stance.

Comment by theletterf 1 day ago

They do, but require that an incident is raised claiming fraud, etc. I guess they want to avoid misuse of this feature.

Comment by mitxela 15 hours ago

Well yes, that's how it works for credit cards too. Chargebacks aren't a thing you can just do on a whim, they are a mechanism for the bank to punish fraudulent merchants. Attempting to get one against a merchant who is not defrauding you is a criminal offence. The bar for fraud is lower than you might think though. Any unauthorized charge, incorrect charge, barrier to cancelling a recurring charge, all counts.

Comment by eis 1 day ago

This is completely normal. You can't just issue a chargeback because you feel like you want your money back after the fact. They want to know what went wrong. It could be fraud but it could be also misleading checkout experience and other reasons. The merchant is charged often a fee for a chargeback on the order of $15 and it might result in penalties.

So, if you feel like you've been charged unfairly (e.g. product not what was expected), in error, fraudulently etc. then chargeback is the route and you should provide a reason. It's a mechanism to protect consumers. If on the other hand you just want your money back without good reason then chargebacks are not the right tool. The consumer also has an obligation to pay if there was no fault on the merchant side.

Honestly, sounds like everything is as it should be?

Comment by miki123211 1 day ago

Exactly this.

In both US and EU, chargebacks are a general consumer protection tool, implemented by card networks to make you less afraid of using them with potentially-untrustworthy merchants, even when not legally required.

They can be used for any kind of legitimate grievance, outright fraud being just one of them. If you book a hotel and the room is not up to the standards on their website, take pictures, take screenshots and chargeback.

They are not, however, a way to cancel a subscription you decide you no longer want (incidentally, neither is cancelling your card). Ask your lawyer, but this is actually illegal and considered fraud in many places. If you make a dumb choice, you have to live with the consequences or follow the contractual route.

Comment by mitxela 15 hours ago

However if you try to cancel the subscription the normal way, and it doesn't work, or there is no normal way, then you escalate to a chargeback and that's valid grounds.

Comment by someguyiguess 21 hours ago

It IS fraud. So report it and get your money back.

Comment by nnyx 19 hours ago

I take advantage of all the temporary card options my credit card provides.

There's one for subscriptions where you give it a monthly limit and if you want to end your subscription and they're being difficult you can just cancel the card.

It's great to basically never be beholden to anyone holding my payment info hostage. I know charge backs exist but while I've never had problems, I would imagine the more you end up having to go down that avenue the more likely you are to have problems using it.

Comment by loremm 18 hours ago

yeah I do the same, very helpful and easy

Comment by jrmg 1 day ago

And your credit card company investigates and accepts your chargeback requests?

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by jbrooks84 1 day ago

By design

Comment by ajross 1 day ago

Not following? Paying with Google Pay is obviously not "easy" if you're not logged in, it's impossible? And obviously you don't need to use an email if you're already authenticated?

Comment by theletterf 23 hours ago

Logged in to Archive.org profile, where you're supposed to manage "subscription". The site lets you donate recurrently even when unlogged, obviously.

Comment by ajross 23 hours ago

Ah. But you can delete the relationship in Google Wallet too, IIRC. I thought that was what you were talking about.

Comment by shevy-java 1 day ago

This makes Google more powerful. I don't want to yield money via any Google services ever.

Comment by miki123211 1 day ago

Google Pay and Apple Pay are basically nicer UIs for your Visa / Mastercard, with some extra privacy protections on top (E.G. they use disposable credit card numbers that merchants can't use to correlate your transactions at different stores).

They offer similar possibilities to what Visa and Mastercard offer, including changing your transaction amount post-factum (E.G. Uber everywhere, restaurants in the US for the weird way Americans do tip processing, some hotels for the minibar / phone / TV bill) and recurring charges.

They're not the same thing as in-app purchases, which are for digital content only, which Apple and Google charge much higher commissions on, and which have a much more pleasant cancellation / management UI. With IAP, Google / Apple is the merchant from your bank's perspective, this is not the case with Apple / Google Pay.

Comment by mitxela 15 hours ago

I don't care. I'm not giving them more power than necessary.

Comment by clcaev 19 hours ago

The 1:2 match scheme is helpful for a foundation to (a) accept large gift and (b) meet 501c3 1/3rd "public support" requirements.

To keep favorable charity taxation status, a large donation can only be accepted if there are sufficient small donors who also contribute. It's complex and indirect, but the matching is quite real as a $100 contribution from a small donor enables the charity to accept a corresponding amount from large donor pledges.

Comment by grogers 19 hours ago

I was always confused about why charities did this type of matching gifts, it always seemed a bit odd just to trick people to giving right now and not whenever. Interesting that there's a structural reason for it, TIL, thank you

Comment by mdrzn 12 minutes ago

"Error establishing a database connection" funny.

Comment by solarkraft 2 hours ago

I’m a big fan of the IA and have donated before.

I would really appreciate it if they spent more resources on improving the site’s UX and fewer on picking pointless and expensive copyright fights.

Comment by klamann 1 day ago

Does the Internet Archive have any options to donate from the EU so I can get a donation receipt from a EU based non-profit? I know there is the "Internet Archive Europe", but that seems to be a Wikimedia like thing, i.e. they don't collect funds for the IA but for whatever it is they are doing here (which is not archiving websites for some reason?).

Comment by Medowar 1 day ago

No, IA is a US non-profit, that status does not apply for EU non-profit donations as tax deductible. There also isnt really an european branch of the IA to donate to, to support the infra/core mission. The other IA Locations(Canada, EU, Swiss) are mostly idependent(probably to avoid any issues with the others, if one does have governance/legal issues), however they share the same mission in aquiring data to save and working with libraries.

Comment by ThePowerOfFuet 1 day ago

Send EUR via SEPA transfer to GB74RBOS16107510000470. (Yes, the page only mentions wire transfer, but SEPA transfers work too, are faster, and cost everyone less.)

Source: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-wire-transfer/

Comment by klamann 1 day ago

there would still be fees for a wire transfer from a EU bank to this bank in the US, right? And I wouldn't get a donation receipt that would be accepted by the tax man over here anyway.

Comment by edelbitter 1 day ago

RBOS is short for Royal Bank of Scotland. When accepting SEPA credit transfer (though they are not legally mandated to offer the instant execution variant), I don't think there is even a mechanism to sneak in extra fees, beyond what the sending institute already billed (typically: 0.00€).

Comment by klamann 1 day ago

I still don't get it. The GB74R.. account number is listed under Final Bank/Beneficiary Bank, which is Citizens Bank NA in the United States. Where does the Royal Bank of Scotland come in? There's no SEPA account number listed for RBOS. Also, Scotland is not part of the EU anymore, so there can be significant fees when wiring money to post-brexit UK.

Comment by edelbitter 1 day ago

Sending money to the intermediary is still essentially free. The likely incorrect assumption here is rather: that it would do any good in this case. Because that only works when the intermediary has agreed to do anything other than facilitate wire transfers (with the beneficiary account number and cost schedule specified!). They would say so in the instructions (e.g. a note on how the SEPA reference field should be filled), if that were the case.

SCT is not contingent on EU or Euro participation - SEPA membership is distinct from those. That is how Iceland, Norway and Switzerland can reap the benefits (the latter not even EEA member, though effective treaties are now somewhat similar). As long as an US bank has a correspondent branch/account/partnership/whatever inside SEPA, they can make it almost free to receive money via SEPA, and then possibly still save on currency conversion and transaction cost as they clear in bulk across the pond.

Comment by Nemo_bis 22 hours ago

USA entities sometimes are not even aware that they have a fully functioning euro account able to receive fee-free SEPA bank transfers, simply as a mechanical consequence of having an euro-denominated account. In the past I've tested this: I asked the IBAN of an euro-denominated account from USA non-profits, got warned nobody ever sent money there, proceeded to send a donation anyway, had it work perfectly fine.

HOWEVER it's conceivable that the USA bank might end up charging some BS fees on their side just because they can. That's hard to control for.

Comment by ThePowerOfFuet 1 day ago

>The GB74R.. account number is listed under Final Bank/Beneficiary Bank, which is Citizens Bank NA in the United States

You clipped it, but it's GB74RBOS... and the RBOS stands for Royal Bank Of Scotland.

https://wise.com/gb/iban/uk

Comment by mitxela 15 hours ago

That wouldn't be a SEPA transfer since it's a British account right? SEPA is one implementation of the general concept of wire transfer, for eurozone accounts to other eurozone accounts.

Comment by daveoc64 14 hours ago

The UK has remained a participant in SEPA, even after Brexit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area#Cove...

Comment by eis 1 day ago

Making a wire transfer is easy, but can it be deducted from taxes? That's the tricky part.

Comment by 47282847 1 day ago

No it can’t. Even across Europe it is not a given that the local tax authorities will easily accept the receipt. Charity law is national.

Comment by tossandthrow 1 day ago

2:1 by who? That is not written.

These types of schemes ring very poorly in my head for charity.

If someone has the ability to give 2$ for every 1$ I give, why are they only giving on contingence?

Just give the money!

Comment by conformist 1 day ago

Value judgment aside: Probably because it works well empirically. If you’re a larger scale donor and you’re interested in maximising impact, you may agree to a matching program type setup to crowd in more donors. Also you feel smart because you crowded in more donors and the donors feel like they got a good deal. So several people feel they can attribute the same counterfactual impact to themselves ;)

Comment by miki123211 1 day ago

If you're a charity, you aren't optimizing for max(value_generated) in an immediate way.

If your mission is to help children with cancer, you don't want to spend 100% of your funding on chemotherapy and drug development, because that way, you eventually run out of money (donors die and their cards expire, and you aren't spending on marketing to bring in new ones). You may spend some of it on buying a fancy yacht and organizing a ball for the rich, which will bring in 4x as much in donations as you spend on getting it to happen, and that's the money you spend on chemo and new drugs. If you care about as much money being spend on cancer research as possible, that's potentially a better way to make it happen than spending your donations on cancer research.

Imagine a donor is willing to give you $1m, but you believe you can get up to $500k in extra donations from strangers on the internet if you do donation matching (it's essentially a free marketing campaign). So you ask them for $500k in hard cash and $500k in matched funds. Even if you overestimate and only get $400k in donations, you're still getting an extra $200k of free money.

Comment by conformist 19 hours ago

Yeah, iterating that a bit further is why paying for political lobbying can be worth it compared to direct donations. However, the less direct your theory of change, the harder to quantify impact and the wider the posterior distribution tends to get. Some of the most impactful things I’ve donated to (imo) have a chance of moving some large scale donations (think Gates) into a marginally more impactful direction.

Comment by minraws 1 day ago

Normal People get to think they are helping 3$'s worth, and Rich people get to think they are helping 3$'s worth...

Both side get to feel like they got more out of the initial investment.

1:3 2:3

Everyone wins inside their heads and its nice to live life where everyone wins...

Also easier to justify charity when you think you are winning..

I feel like it's pretty good for what it is.

Comment by jeltz 1 day ago

Actually rich people think they re helping more than that. If we assume the average length of a recurring donation is 6 months they feel they help 8 dollars for every 2 they donate.

But otherwise you are right, this is done because it makes everyone donating feel like a winner other than few cynics like me. :D But that said I do not mind these drives.

Comment by itake 1 day ago

In another charity, I offered the 1:1 match. My reasoning was

0/ marketing

1/ credibility. Someone wealthy thinks the charity is important

If you publicly give $2m, people might think, that’s probably enough… no need to give more.

If you quietly give $2m usd and a tree falls in a forest…

Comment by bawolff 1 day ago

> These types of schemes ring very poorly in my head for charity.

These types of schemes are so common as to basically be universal. You'd probably be hard pressed to find a major charity that hasn't participated in something like this.

Comment by vova_hn2 23 hours ago

I've read a theory somewhere (too lazy to find the source, sorry), that people tend to care more about a cause that they have already donated to. Possible explanation is trying to avoid wasting money: "if I already spent money on this, it better be successful, or else my money will be wasted".

If it is true, there is a value in getting people to donate something, however small, because it makes them more likely to donate or help in other ways in the future.

Comment by DrewADesign 1 day ago

The idea is that if I have $200,000 to give to a charity and I give $200,000, my $200,000 yields $200,000 for the charity.

If I say I’m going to match other people’s money 2:1 and that convinces people donate $90,000, my $180,000 yields $270,000 for the charity. I’d probably have written off the 200k anyway and just toss in the rest after, or throw it at another good cause.

Comment by fizzbuzzbarbazz 1 day ago

Also, it allows the matching party to directly gauge and give along the lines of true public interest, and not waste their money on something nobody cares about.

Comment by hkpack 1 day ago

Yes, I wonder why this is not the most obvious reason.

There are infinite ways to give away money, this scheme allows to align better with what causes other people are ready to support with their own money.

Comment by zikduruqe 1 day ago

Just like my local grocery store.

They'll ask me to round up my purchase to help feed the hungry. Why can't they not invest in all the infrastructure and systems to support this, and just donate a few nickels and quarters themselves. Plus they have the food to give.

Comment by devilbunny 1 day ago

Big, successful grocery stores operate on a 3% margin. It’s mostly a commodities business. Doing all that alone could entirely wipe their profit.

Comment by zikduruqe 1 day ago

And my local grocery store sponsors Indycar racing and has a track they sponsor. They also throw away produce that looks bad, although it is perfectly edible.

I am not going to cry because the CEO cannot afford a yacht payment next month.

Comment by devilbunny 15 hours ago

Yes, they advertise. And they discard things that will not sell. That is what businesses do. Most of them try to sell it for a lower price first.

Comment by wolvoleo 18 hours ago

Yeah but just don't do it at all then. If I want to sponsor a good cause I'll do so when I want to. I'm also annoyed with having to decline that shit. Besides, I live in Europe. If something is important enough the government should subsidize them, that's what they're there for. We don't do this capitalist small government stuff.

PayPal and Stripe are doing it too now.

Comment by oefrha 1 day ago

> That is not written.

Probably to avoid being shamed for not "just give the money". Exhibit A.

Comment by olejorgenb 23 hours ago

Because it amplifies how much is given in total? If after the campaign they still have more to give they could always give the remaining?

Comment by Sweepi 1 day ago

|If someone has the ability to give 2$ for every 1$ I give, why are they only giving on contingence? |Just give the money!

Why? If i had the money, I would do the same.

Comment by 20 hours ago

Comment by arjie 1 day ago

I do like the Internet Archive but I wish I could retrieve large segments from it myself. It has very aggressive 429s. It would be a nice higher donor tier feature. Maybe it’s not possible to do so and retain 501c3 status? Regardless I have had to start performing personal datahoarding. C’est la vie.

Comment by Drupon 21 hours ago

Yeah they are more than happy to allow my VPN traffic to access these donation pages, but the second I try to access anything, it's a blanket 429 to anything I try to go to. Why would I donate to something I can't access?

Comment by anilakar 1 day ago

I was looking for some CNATRA (US naval aviation) unclassified, non-distribution-controlled training manuals and noticed that the newest ones had been deindexed when they were put behind authentication.

Stop hiding public data and I might reconsider.

Comment by jcrawfordor 20 hours ago

Yesterday I discovered that WayBackMachine appears to be serving 429s to all Chrome-based browsers, across all network connections. Using Firefox (or a firefox UA) fixes it. I assume this is a temporary situation, or even by mistake, but underscores that archive.org is getting creaky and hard to actually use.

Comment by thechairman12 1 day ago

They posted on X about supporting this when someone was spamming them with requests

Comment by eru 1 day ago

I wonder if they could sell you access to a bittorrent tracker? Officially it would be independent of the donations, just an extra service they sell?

Comment by yreg 1 day ago

Why sell? I thought the idea of donating to them is to make the information available for everyone for free.

Comment by eru 10 hours ago

Bandwidth costs money, and one could sell premium access to fund one's more public minded services.

Comment by queenkjuul 1 day ago

They have torrent downloads for a lot of content, I've downloaded almost a terabyte from them via torrent, they're just not bundled, as in you would need to retrieve each torrent file for each item individually, which might still get you a 429 if you automated it idk.

I've never actually got a 429 using a browser though personally, they do throttle aggressively though

Comment by smolder 1 day ago

Anyone with a lot of data has to carefully apply limits to not get bankrupted by frontier AI people with residential proxies scraping the shit out of everything.

Comment by prirun 1 day ago

I read that Internet Archive keeps 2 copies of all their data. Storj, the decentralized storage service, is currently in Chap 11 bankruptcy, mostly IMO because of incompetent management. They pay their node operators, the guys that actually maintain the hard drive space, $1.35/TB/mo to store data. (However it costs Storj 1.8x that because of erasure coding). They still have way more available capacity going unused, so it's likely they could lower the payout rate even further and have talked about doing that.

Internet Archive could buy Storj, probably for not much, keep 1 copy of their archive on the IA custom server setup they have now, keep the other copy on Storj, and free up half of the IA disk space. Storj automagically uploads data to 54 nodes, any 29 of which can reconstruct the original data (54/29 is where the 1.8 expansion factor occurs).

Comment by 01284a7e 23 hours ago

"Storj, the decentralized storage service, is currently in Chap 11 bankruptcy,"

"Internet Archive could buy Storj"

Insanely convoluted solution that only someone with crypto-brain would ever come up with. You are really suggesting the Internet Archive should buy a bankrupted crypto company so they can store their data? What?

Comment by piinbinary 21 hours ago

It's more productive to explain why the idea doesn't work, since people can learn from that.

Comment by 20 hours ago

Comment by tekno45 21 hours ago

nonsense is not owed a response.

Comment by 19 hours ago

Comment by 17 hours ago

Comment by not_really 17 hours ago

And yet, here you are responding

Comment by ttul 21 hours ago

Yes, and that's a great idea. Chapter 11 protects companies from their creditors. If a suitor comes along offering to buy the company that is in Chapter 11, the creditors can go to the judge and request that the judge allow the purchase to go through as a way of settling the company's debts. It happens all the time.

Comment by mitxela 14 hours ago

Why buy the rights to store data on a bunch of random people's hard drives instead of buying a bunch of hard drives? It's just not efficient.

Comment by ProllyInfamous 21 hours ago

The major problem with the (low) payout on Storj is that 29/54 node requirement is still too high for reliable long-term data retention.

Also, even if you live in the least-expensive electricity places in the world, residentially it will cost you more in electricity to keep those platters spinning 24/7 [than the payout].

----

It is popular in the hobby cryptomining community to replace your under-desk spaceheater with a Monero mining rig (I also do this), and then only run it during wintertime (b/c it is effectively free mining, if you were already going to be running a resistive spaceheater).

Unfortunately, this cryptomining solution doesn't lend itself well to distributed-datastore cryptos because they are offline the majority of the year (i.e. files inaccessible).

----

As a part-time miner since 2012... I really wanted to like Storj, but if you want to get paid to replace your spaceheater at home, mine Monero on surplus CPUs (for reference: new $500 Ryzen798003xd mines at 5.5khashes/s; obsolete i5 still gets 3.8kH/s). Storj is in bankruptcy for fiscal reasons due to its impossible logistics.

Comment by detourdog 17 hours ago

How many BTUs or kJs is that?

Comment by ProllyInfamous 1 hour ago

I have a combined 2800BTUs of Monero heating capability, which is equivalent to a standard US "spaceheater" running on medium heat.

Localized beneath my main office computer desk, this allows me to further reduce heating of my entire domicile.

Comment by riobard 23 hours ago

Maybe they could start a Archive@Home project for volunteers to donate unused disk space for the greater good.

Comment by TechSquidTV 22 hours ago

They do have that. All archives have torrents.

Comment by johannes1234321 21 hours ago

Which means somewhat popular, somewhat larger have backups. Important would be backups for things nobody else is interested in. The ones where one person in 10 years will ask for.

Comment by mitxela 14 hours ago

And half those torrents are missing half their files because the torrent generator races with the upload process and often runs on a half completed upload.

Comment by ndiddy 9 hours ago

This has been a problem for years at this point and they still haven’t fixed it, it’s frankly bizarre.

Comment by schmeichel 22 hours ago

I know I'd love to run something like this!

Comment by toomuchtodo 19 hours ago

https://getdweb.net/ is that project.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29639222

> As noted the Internet Archive is experimenting with filecoin.io and storj.io and is always open to suggestions about how we might do our jobs better, and improve our service. We also host regular meetups (and have hosted summits and a camp) related to the Decentralized Web. See: https://blog.archive.org/tag/dweb/

Inside The Internet Archive's Infrastructure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46613324 - February 2026 (119 comments)

u/stavros proposed "Elephant" as well, which could be implemented today without Archive.org's explicit assistance.

Elephant system design - https://gist.github.com/skorokithakis/68984ef699437c5129660d... (A distributed, voluntary backup system (high-level design document))

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46637992 (additional context)

(TLDR Every Archive.org item has a torrent, enabling distributed replication and serving of archived items and their contents, Wayback is a bit trickier; you can also ask your local nation state and museum/preservation apparatus to colocate some IA racks, if one is so inclined; The Internet Archive’s entire annual budget ($30M-$40M) covers 200PB storage plus all operations)

Comment by brokensegue 23 hours ago

Isn't storj a crypto thing? I don't think they'd want to be involved. I get the sense they are idealists

Comment by insom 22 hours ago

They are idealists but also like cryptocurrency and decentralization. I recognize that's pretty rare since the late 2010's reputation of various coins and their environmental impact but IA is heavily associated with (and received much money from) FileCoin:

https://ffdweb.org/

(and I am not saying it's bad, or indeed good, just that the usual expectations of being pro- or anti- cryptocurrency or AI don't easily map to things like the Archive)

Comment by toomuchtodo 19 hours ago

The Internet Archive can store data in perpetuity for ~$3/GB one time (estimated based on recent AI driven hardware inflation, used to be $2/GB).

https://blog.dshr.org/2026/01/internet-archives-storage.html

https://blog.dshr.org/2021/03/internet-archive-storage.html

https://archive-it.org/vault/

Comment by pm90 1 day ago

It was super easy to donate; Im so glad they have a landing page that supports several payment methods and makes it easy to donate. I love the wayback machine, hope everyone pitches in : ).

Comment by Cider9986 1 day ago

THere's also archive.today who does great user-directed archiving. We don't appreciate this infrastructure some random guy runs enough.

It's annoying how often archive.org blocks sites but they both complement each other very well.

https://liberapay.com/archiveis/donate

https://coindrop.to/archive

When finding archive.today's Monero donation address just now, I had to use archive.org because donatemonero.org [1] is down.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260526080016/https://donatemon...

Comment by LeoPanthera 1 day ago

Um. You mean the same site that uses its captcha page to DDOS sites the owner doesn't agree with, and was banned from use on Wikipedia because the owner was modifying the archived pages?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#2026_attack_on_G...

I don't think we should be supporting this random guy, no.

Comment by agile-gift0262 1 day ago

What offends me the most is how they used visitor's compute and badnwidth for ther own purpose unrelated to the reason the visitor accessed the site, without consent or disclosure. It's MY computer, MY internet, not yours to do with it what you please

Comment by progval 1 day ago

> to DDOS sites the owner doesn't agree with

to DDOS one website, which is doxxing the owner. Not that it makes it good idea, but it's a little more understandable.

Comment by bulder 1 day ago

DDoSing a website, modifying their archives surreptitiously to serve their own wants (which was what tipped Wikipedia towards banning their use), running weird sockpuppet campaigns to build dependence on them, and fucking with Cloudflare's DNS resolution to prevent anti-tracking measures from working.

Oh and even if I wanted to ignore all of this, I couldn't use them anyways because they blackholed the majority of Finnish IP ranges after the DDoS incident to I guess punish the entire country for the targeted blogger being born here.

Comment by dakolli 1 day ago

archive.today has been targeted by Western institutions, like the FBI, for over a year now. Which signals to me they are the good guys.

Comment by wongarsu 1 day ago

All that tells us is that the site is probably not run by the FBI. It could still be run by the CIA, Russian intelligence, or some lone morally neutral guy from Prague

Comment by bawolff 1 day ago

If it was run by the CIA or russian intelligence, they wouldn't have burned their asset with petty grudges.

Comment by nosrepa 1 day ago

Have you seen this current administration?

Comment by DaSHacka 1 day ago

You realize the CIA is nonpartisan, right?

Comment by someguyiguess 21 hours ago

I genuinely cannot tell if this was meant to be humorous.

Comment by SXX 1 day ago

Come on. It's not WikiLeaks. If they were targeted by FBI it would be down.

Comment by dakolli 1 day ago

What do you mean, I didnt make it up... Its detailed on the archive.today wikipedia page.

The media barrons in the west have bribed the US government to pursue archive criminally on their behalf for helping people bypass paywalls.

https://www.theverge.com/news/815691/fbi-subpoena-archive-is...

Comment by bulder 1 day ago

That's great, how does that absolve the archive.today maintainer's bad faith activities, including creating a country-wall?

Comment by DaSHacka 1 day ago

Because if he's being targeted by the feds, he obviously he doesn't want his private information being published by some guy who self-admittedly did it on a whim?

Is this really that hard to understand?

Comment by dakolli 1 day ago

Umm, every USA company blocks North Korea, Iran and often Cuba.

One guy blocking a single country is not at all problematic.

Comment by radicalcentrist 1 day ago

I'm not well-informed about this situation, but DDOSing does strike me as an action which is fundamentally counter to information freedom and archival, so that seems like a reasonable suspicion to me.

Comment by RobotToaster 1 day ago

I would add it was also completely ineffective since the site in question was hosted on wordpress.com, which is about as likely to work as ddosing Google.

Comment by forestingfisher 1 day ago

If it works, it works. Also the Internet Archive also excludes many sites for ideological reasons which is the opposite of preservation

Comment by Hamuko 1 day ago

Not sure how well it’s “working” considering any of the archived pages might be altered by the site’s administrator to further their causes. There’s a reason why Wikipedia stopped trusting them.

Comment by forestingfisher 1 day ago

I agree, it makes sense for large source-reliant projects like Wikipedia to stop using them. However, for the end-user, it's often the service that works best.

Comment by vachina 1 day ago

Please provide example of such cases?

Comment by Hamuko 1 day ago

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...

Comment by vachina 1 day ago

Sounds like fair game. Jani is trying to destroy the archive.

Comment by Hamuko 1 day ago

If that is the case, he succeeded since the archive totally lost all credibility in an instant.

Comment by DaSHacka 1 day ago

Maybe in the eyes of some, but the archive is still up and the operator is not dead to two shots to the back of the head.

Comment by mitxela 14 hours ago

Only to people who think archiving outside of the bounds of the law doesn't count, such as yourself.

Comment by Cider9986 1 day ago

And archive.org removes perfectly legal content from their accessible archives. Nobody's perfect. The guy running archive.today has done a shit ton of good.

Comment by hnfong 1 day ago

[flagged]

Comment by jan_m_savage 1 day ago

My beef with IA is that none of the books as listed for borrowing are borrowable anymore. Why list it then!

Comment by Cider9986 22 hours ago

AA is what I use.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by andai 1 day ago

Well then another guy should provide a technically equivalent and morally superior service ;)

Comment by markasoftware 1 day ago

I mean, lots of other archive.* sites exist and do the same thing minus problematic behavior, such as archive.is, archive.oh (though maybe some are operated by the same individual...)

Comment by plorg 1 day ago

Are any of those not run by the archive.today guy? That site has like a dozen aliases.

Comment by Cider9986 1 day ago

Wikipedia links these as the mirrors.

archive.today

archive.fo

archive.is

archive.li

archive.md

archive.ph

archive.vn

archiveiya74codqgiixo33q62qlrqtkgmcitqx5u2oeqnmn5bpcbiyd.onion

Comment by mitxela 14 hours ago

They're all the same site.

Comment by topato 1 day ago

Haha all of those are .today aliases. Not sure the hate over him ddosing the guy doxxing him. .today’s paywall circumvention is also why miscellaneous groups have tried to report him to the FBI over planted CSAM material, among other horrible harassment. I think we should all give him a second chance for the huge amount of time, both before and after the stupid and short lived ddos incident, that he has dedicated to archiving.

His identity must be secretive, as he has already drawn the ire of many powers that be, so… I personally think the ddos incident was justified… and I’m glad my bandwidth helped in any way, frankly. Some people seem to really want to portray him as some shady evil bad guy, and after all the hit jobs against him in the past year or two, I really wonder who these anti-archive.today people actually are and what they’re motivations are (besides money).

Comment by p91paul 1 day ago

I think the fact they are known to have changed the content of archived pages is way worse than the DDoS incident, since it makes them untrustworthy even as a source of information. Wikipedia decided to ban all archive.today (and aliases) links because of that

Comment by vachina 1 day ago

Do you have an example of such cases happening?

Comment by p91paul 15 hours ago

this is from the wikipedia discussion that led to the decision of banning it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...

Comment by mitxela 14 hours ago

Justifiable. Just because Wikipedia has extremely strict standards doesn't mean it isn't useful for the rest of us.

Comment by mitxela 14 hours ago

Yeah but they're a sanctioned terrorist organisation, so if you donate to them your bank account will be frozen and you'll go to jail.

Edit: of course you should donate Monero

Comment by qingcharles 1 day ago

Absolutely deserves a donation too. How it keeps running is beyond me, especially as he/she/they keep adding more paywall bypasses on the backend.

Comment by esskay 1 day ago

It doesnt really deserve anything given they used the site to attack people. See the comment above yours.

Comment by vachina 1 day ago

I’d gladly join his/her botnet. archive.is is the only archive that acts like an archive.

Comment by esskay 1 day ago

That would be pretty crappy of you given he was attacking an innocent 3rd party. Morals be damned i guess.

Comment by mitxela 14 hours ago

You mean the guy who was trying to get the archive's owner prison time, right? Doesn't seem very innocent to me.

Comment by DaSHacka 1 day ago

"innocent" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement.

Does it change the calculus at all if this "innocent" person was trying to dox the operator for nothing more than satisfying a personal whim?

Comment by botanical 1 day ago

I also think archive.today is superior to web.archive.org as it breaks less when archiving sources. It's a shame Wikipedia blacklisted it now as an archive source.

Comment by DaSHacka 1 day ago

They also don't arbitrarily nuke entire domains (with legal content) from the archive like archive.org does.

Comment by Hamuko 1 day ago

They just arbitrarily nuke entire countries and arbitrarily edit the content that the archives contain.

Comment by mitxela 14 hours ago

[citation needed]

Comment by totalconfusion 1 day ago

Who's paying?

Comment by killingtime74 1 day ago

I click through to a few links and cannot find who is doing the matching

Comment by Daneel_ 1 day ago

That’s what I want to know before committing too.

Comment by lukeify 1 day ago

Truly stunning that they omitted this information.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by colesantiago 1 day ago

Let's be honest, almost nobody is donating a significant amount i.e. $100K+ to the Internet Archive that would actually keep them alive.

Everyone wants to scrape and extract from them 100% for free.

Comment by j16sdiz 1 day ago

No. The question OP ask was.... who is paying for the matching?

The donation got 3x, sure somebody is paying, right?

I was planning to donate, and this omission stopped me.

Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD 1 day ago

Why are you guys getting worked up over this? What's wrong with donors wanting to be anonymous?

Comment by ssl-3 1 day ago

It's OK for a donor that provides matching funds to wish for, and to be granted, anonymity.

It's also OK for primary donors to be suspicious of this for any reason that they choose, including no reason at all.

Maybe the matching-funds donor is all peachy and clean. Maybe they're the root of all evil.

We don't know.

This lack of knowledge doesn't let people make an informed decision, and people are allowed to seek to make informed decisions and to get turned off when that isn't possible. :)

(For the record: I'm more motivated to toss a few dollars in the hat when there's a multiplier at play than when there is not. I don't really care who it is that supplies the extra money.

My mentality might lead me to a situation wherein my donation to the local orphanage is anonymously multiplied by a nearby orphan crushing facility that turns lost kids into soylent green, but it's a risk that I'm willing to take.

Others are free to be as averse or accepting as they wish.)

Comment by AnthonyMouse 1 day ago

> Maybe the matching-funds donor is all peachy and clean. Maybe they're the root of all evil.

If they were the root of all evil then shouldn't you want to donate even more, to increase the amount of money they donate to the non-profit and reduce the amount they have left for their evil doings?

Comment by ssl-3 1 day ago

Not necessarily, no.

Evil has no boundaries.

Comment by mitxela 14 hours ago

Donating to archive.org is considered boundless evil now?

Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD 1 day ago

"Evil has no boundaries."

Pseudo-profound statements on my HN?

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WDFXJZabt5s

Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD 1 day ago

The reason to avoid working with sketchy donors is so they don't unduly influence you. If they're anonymous, how can they influence you?

Comment by ssl-3 1 day ago

Even when their matching donation is anonymous and the direct influence is zero, the orphan crushing facility wants the orphanage to be successful.

The orphanage's rising success serves to limit the supply of orphans. This means that there aren't as many free-roaming orphans available for crushing as more of them get taken off of the market.

This improves the supply-and-demand ratio for orphan-derived products. A successful orphanage means that the the orphan crushing facility can make more money while doing less of that tedious work of -- you know -- crushing orphans.

(I don't know what kind of secondary or tertiary games could be played with anonymous matching donations to archive.org; my creativity has limits. But I do know that my support for enabling people to make informed personal decisions is approximately boundless, as anything less would be stifling.)

Comment by retsibsi 1 day ago

Maybe I misunderstand the analogy, but in this scenario it seems that the orphan crushing facility's donations to the orphanage are an unalloyed good. Their motives are bad, and they are bad, but their donations to the orphanage are causing more orphans to be taken care of and fewer orphans to be crushed.

Personally, my worry about anonymous donation matching would be that the anonymous (to me) funder is influencing the recipient (to whom their identity is known), and without knowing who they are I can't know the nature of this influence or whether it should cause me to reconsider my support. But I don't see any extra reason to care about anonymous donation matching in particular, as distinct from any other funding whose source is opaque to me.

Comment by ssl-3 18 hours ago

Oh. Right. You just introduced the concept of non-anonymous (to the orphanage) matching funds. I didn't think of that.

More money for the orphanage means more orphans can be taken in. That's good, right? But since the extra funds are not anonymous (to the orphanage), then it can come with influence on policies.

Policies like: All orphans are now accepted up to a certain age regardless of circumstance, and all orphans now get kicked out at age 12 regardless of ongoing need.

The stated reason is that the orphanage only has so many resources, and little kids need a lot more care than 12-year-olds do. So a line must be drawn somewhere, and that line is at age 12.

It's a popular policy: After all, when given binary choice, everyone would rather see a 3-year-old be taken good care of than a 12-year-old. Think of the little children!

For the orphan crushing facility that helped to impart this policy with their very generous policy-adjustment matching funds, that's a solid win: The orphanage now acts as a livestock kennel where orphans grow in size. There's still fewer of them coming out the far end, but they're bigger than they were before and are now much easier to process in bulk.

People know about the orphan crushing facility. They know they can't do anything about it; it just looms over there like any other dark fact of life. But the streets aren't full of roaming herds of abandoned kids anymore at all, so folks logically conclude that the 12-and-out policy must be working.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD 1 day ago

I think in this hypothetical, the existence of an orphan-crushing industry should make you reluctant to donate to orphanages regardless of who's doing the donation matching.

Comment by zorked 1 day ago

> Maybe the matching-funds donor is all peachy and clean. Maybe they're the root of all evil.

Money going from the root of all evil to the Internet Archive?

Two cakes.

Comment by smolder 1 day ago

I could see it being a Zuckerberg "charity" thing motivated by a need for training data, so, yeah.

Comment by losteric 1 day ago

why?? It's extremely common for nonprofits to have anonymous matching donors. Even my local animal shelter.

Comment by Daneel_ 1 day ago

Then why not just say that in the post?

"Our matching donor wishes to remain anonymous, but we thank them for their generosity"

Simple.

Comment by sonicrocketman 1 day ago

Just posting this so others can be reminded to donate the archive (no association by me, just a fan).

Comment by esskay 1 day ago

I'm quite surprised they havent also adopted a high paying sponsorship model. If they had something and large hosting providers were pressured into sponsoring them by customers they'd have no funding issues.

Also why arent they on opencollective? Surely thats a no brainer!

Comment by zachlatta 1 day ago

The AI companies should all make visionary donations to the Internet Archive.

Comment by do_it_for_free 1 day ago

They have some positions posted on their job board. I would do this for free. They should adopt a volunteer workforce like the Redcross Code4Good Volunteer Enterprise Web Services team.

Senior Datacenter Network Infrastructure Engineer Full Time San Francisco, CA, US 30+ days ago Requisition ID: XXXX Salary Range: $140,000.00 To $200,000.00 Annually

Comment by aurareturn 1 day ago

Pick 2 out of 3 for these kinds of volunteer work:

- Capable

- Reliable

- Free

You going to be on call at 3am to bring services back up doing it for free?

Comment by ndriscoll 1 day ago

Is it very important that they have someone to restore service at 3am? This isn't a hospital here; it's more like a library. My library is closed at 3am every day!

Comment by justin66 1 day ago

> Is it very important that they have someone to restore service at 3am?

Depends on the service, but any effort to maintain this daft "gosh, what are they worried about, it's just the internet archive" line of thought is going to depend on either trivializing the needs of their staff, their users, or their computer systems. Good on them for taking things more seriously.

(3:00 AM on the west coast is work hours for some of their volunteers, users, and contributors across the globe)

> My library is closed at 3am every day!

A library will have IT staff on call. Staff need their computers to work when they come in in the morning, users need the infrastructure working in order to do pretty much anything - and why the hell shouldn't people be able to use an online borrowing service in the middle of the night?

Comment by ndriscoll 23 hours ago

They can use an online service in the middle of the night, but as a citizen, I'd be upset if I learned my public library were paging someone in the middle of the night if it weren't working. That's incredibly inappropriate. It can wait.

Like I said in another comment, computers generally don't just randomly stop working, but no, a library worker doesn't need their computer at 9am so badly that they need an on-call IT worker (and presumably some kind of middle-of-the-night monitoring) to ensure it before they get in. Patrons don't have some incredibly urgent need to borrow a book such that we need 5 nines of uptime here. Or any SLA at all. It's fixed when it's fixed.

This attitude is how you waste a ton of money overcomplicating everything while making working conditions terrible for literally no reason. We should not "take seriously" things which are not serious just for fun. Nothing bad happens if the library computer is down for a couple hours beyond maybe some mild disappointment, or perhaps manually writing the data on cards like we did 30 years ago for a bit.

Hell, most banks in the US are "closed" for maintenance online for several hours every weekend (or at least they were as of a couple years ago) and no one cares. It's fine.

I work on systems that are in the critical path of 24/7 manufacturing lines, so I'm familiar with things that actually do rapidly cause problems if there's an outage. But that's not every computer system in the world.

And if they have people across the globe, then problem solved; they don't need a 3am on-call.

Comment by justin66 22 hours ago

> a library worker doesn't need their computer at 9am so badly that they need an on-call IT worker (and presumably some kind of middle-of-the-night monitoring) to ensure it before they get in.

A single worker probably doesn't, yes. In contrast, hundreds of people being unable to do anything when they come to work in the morning is not a terrible reason to call someone and have them login for a few minutes.

Back to the IA, it seems to me our hundreds of thousands of users, employees and volunteers in time zones across the globe will be unable to access the service until we fix this is a decent reason for an institution that takes its own mission seriously to have an on-call. But you do you.

> Hell, most banks in the US are "closed" for maintenance online for several hours every weekend (or at least they were as of a couple years ago) and no one cares. It's fine.

(this is my industry) Some of their online services are closed, yes. The hours they'll be closed are typically posted ahead of time to minimize the inconvenience to everyone concerned and to display an understanding on the part of the institution that downtime is taken seriously and to signal it is not the result of carelessness. In contrast to online services, most institutions consider it a major failure if something like the ATM system is down for more than a few minutes.

> This attitude is how you waste a ton of money overcomplicating everything while making working conditions terrible for literally no reason.

That's remarkably backwards. The need for humans to be on-call is a result of systems being overcomplicated, not a cause.

Comment by ndriscoll 22 hours ago

If it's only a few minutes, you could just as well fix it at the start of the day. And if it's not, oh well? People can still read books. The librarian can still help them to find a book. If they want to manually track until the computer is back up, they could even still do checkouts.

If those users just say "oh, okay, I'll check back in a couple hours", then okay. Again, this is not hundreds of thousands of people without power or water or something. It's viewing or uploading to an archive. Like, if you're a user, do you really want someone woken up at 3am because you can't use the wayback machine right now? Because "they should take it seriously"? There's a person actually having to deal with that because... you really want to get that one Grateful Dead concert video from their free archive right now? I'm happy to say that yeah I hope their engineers aren't on-call after hours. I would much prefer that they get a good night's rest rather than fix it for me. I hope they're a cool place to work without delusional, psychopathic management.

Perhaps put another way, is there any computer service now that doesn't need a guarantee? Or is everything just critical now?

My point isn't that on-call is overcomplicating, it's that inventing and chasing an SLA often leads to expensive complicated systems (which, ironically, can often directly lead to lower uptime), and on-call has a human cost.

Comment by justin66 20 hours ago

At this point I think you’re just committed to the bit but you cannot possibly believe what you’re writing, as it’s a blinkered analysis and truly misanthropic in its effect. A metropolitan library system employs hundreds of people in a variety of roles and if we can prevent them from having a frustrating and wasteful start to their day, it’s worth an on-call person’s time.

> and on-call has a human cost.

In the context of this thread, we’re talking about this job description:

Senior Datacenter Network Infrastructure Engineer Full Time San Francisco, CA, US 30+ days ago Requisition ID: XXXX Salary Range: $140,000.00 To $200,000.00 Annually

It’s not like we’re talking about indentured servitude or something.

> Perhaps put another way, is there any computer service now that doesn't need a guarantee? Or is everything just critical now?

That’s an interesting strawman you have there. I thought I killed it upthread when I wrote “Depends on the service.”

Comment by ndriscoll 19 hours ago

No, I quite strongly believe it actually. I likewise find it hard to believe you're serious, so I'll raise my question again: if not even a municipal library (which, I'll remind you, aren't even open the majority of the time and we all get by just fine), what is an example of a non-critical service in your mind? Maybe the online checkin for a specific Great Clips? It depends on what? Pointing out that "it depends on the service", and that a library clearly isn't critical was my whole original point.

Misanthropic to me is making every IT job require getting up in the middle of the night to save a 100*epsilon of theoretical frustration lest we be perceived as lacking the requisite seriousness. And when someone points out that actually a given case is really not a big deal, we're met with "but hundreds of thousands of people might think 'oh, darn' for a moment!" And for a library, IME librarians tend to be really chill, so I suspect they'd, like me, attest that actually they'd prefer you not work at midnight on their account. Like I said, as a citizen funding and using my library, I sure hope they don't treat their employees that way.

Comment by justin66 17 hours ago

> a municipal library (which, I'll remind you, aren't even open the majority of the time and we all get by just fine),

At least half of a modern library's lending happens digitally. But let's put aside the example of the library.

> what is an example of a non-critical service in your mind?

I thought the example above of hundreds of people being unable to start their work day until someone solves an especially serious IT problem was universal, not unique to a library system's network. It's relevant to the Internet Archive, and even relevant to...

> Maybe the online checkin for a specific Great Clips?

Maybe not? Their entire WAN being down, affecting dozens of stores, possibly yes?

I'm not sure what's difficult here. Paying a person to be available to deal with a problem serious enough to justify the call makes sense. Sending trivial, less serious problems that can easily wait until business hours their way at night makes less sense.

Taking those calls isn't necessarily a bad job, but somehow that assumption is baked into what you're saying.

> Misanthropic to me is making every IT job require getting up in the middle of the night

Let's not do that, then.

Comment by Barbing 19 hours ago

This is really interesting to me. I wonder how many more hours of downtime The Archive would have experienced in 2025 if no one was ever woken up out of bed to fix it. (If anyone was)

I also wonder the cost differential.

Got me thinking about these incredible beautiful museums that are closed all night long… you’d still want someone there early enough to catch if the roof leaked so nobody missed their opening-hour tours. Back to libraries, bummer if I can’t renew my book online one night but would set reminder to try again later. Could affect my perception of my library’s tech prowess! That’s a risk for TIA! (Though I experience many a delay and downtime… perhaps my fault for using iCloud Private Relay like I bet scrapers sometimes abuse… but a few more hours overnight here and there wouldn’t be catastrophic for my current perception.)

Mainly would want overnight support to be cheap since stuff’s donation run. - Love TIA! An internet-billionaire should make history becoming a billionaire donor today (hope one’s reading this :) ).

Comment by justin66 17 hours ago

World class art museums have some staff on site 24/7, FWIW.

> I wonder how many more hours of downtime The Archive would have experienced in 2025 if no one was ever woken up out of bed to fix it. (If anyone was)

Wasn't 2025 the year a kooky pro-Palestinian hacker collective decided IA was a good target for their idiocy? There was a great deal of overtime involved there.

Comment by bloguser 22 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by cindyllm 21 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by aurareturn 1 day ago

Ok how about 6am? 7pm?

The point is that someone needs to bring the service back up and they can't rely on volunteers to do it whenever they feel like it.

Comment by ndriscoll 1 day ago

My local library isn't open at 6am either (opens at 9, or 10 on Sat and 1 on Sun), and closes before 7 on Fri-Sun.

> someone needs to

Do they though? Why is there some assumed urgency? What happens if they don't do it "whenever they feel like it" (e.g. normal hours)?

Computers also generally don't randomly just stop working, and if they did in this case (network engineer), it's almost certainly the ISP anyway.

Comment by aurareturn 1 day ago

Archive is likely one of the top traffic destinations on the internet. Your local library is likely not.

Maybe they want to hire someone full-time is so they don't have to have a policy of whenever they feel like it?

Having a reliable service is likely one of the reasons why their donors donate in the first place. Why do organizations and wealthy people still want to donate if the service goes down for 2 days and no one cares? Why would this kind of non-profit attract top volunteers in the first place?

Comment by ndriscoll 1 day ago

High traffic doesn't mean high urgency. New York Public Library is huge and looks to have even more restrictive hours than mine. They're closed on Sundays!

People donate because they believe in the mission, and most of the money probably goes to the actual storage (making the cost of an employee probably pointless to care about, of course).

It would attract top volunteers in the first place because they'd think "I want this to exist, and perhaps they need some help." No one's going to think "wow the wayback machine was unavailable for two days? What a bunch of amateurs." Actually even if they paid me $200k, I'd assume they have some priority issues if they wanted me to be on-call and couldn't convince me of why that's necessary. That'd be a huge red flag for some nightmare mismanagement.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by egorfine 1 day ago

> You going to be on call at 3am to bring services back up doing it for free?

Yes. For the Internet Archive I totally would. As responsible as I do my main job.

Comment by insom 22 hours ago

The work required to keep IA infrastructure operating is full time: these are full-time positions. IIRC they were at ~70 racks of stuff just in the California locations and apart from on-call and emergency response there's growth to keep up with, future planning etc.

There's no reasonable world where this is a few hour's per week volunteering like your local boat club. It's a Top 200 website, around the size of the Guardian newspaper -- never mind that Wayback is only a small portion of what they do. (Book scanning, inter-library loans, paid services for other GLAM organizations and governments etc.)

Comment by egorfine 22 hours ago

True. It is also unreasonable to expect a lone full-time employee being the only one available at 3am every single day.

Comment by aurareturn 1 day ago

You should definitely apply and sign a contract. They should charge you money if you don't show up at 3am in an outage.

All it takes is one emergency and the volunteer person doesn't show up for the non profit to want to hire a full time person. This event has likely already occurred at Archive.

Comment by egorfine 1 day ago

This is a genuine consideration.

Comment by justin66 1 day ago

They have plenty of volunteers. You can't run everything in an organization using volunteers.

Comment by account42 1 day ago

It always irks me when these tech organizations beg for donations to ... pay silicon valley wages because they insist on being located where all the other big boys are.

Comment by insom 22 hours ago

Maybe some organizations do this but not IA.

I worked there (as a software developer) for 3 months and took a 75% pay-cut from my previous tech job. Luckily I don't live in SF! IIRC California employees were paid a little more, but not even remotely SV money.

Comment by abeyer 1 day ago

"Keep running" is interesting phrasing, given that wayback has been serving me nothing but some mix of timeouts, 429 errors, and "Temporarily Offline" messages for weeks.

Comment by smolder 1 day ago

I've watched whole video series from their archives. What are you doing to get throttled?

Comment by badlibrarian 19 hours ago

Which archives? Wayback is different from Archive. Which is different from Archive-It. And the problem with Wayback was power poles being set on fire by homeless people, then SF power in general, then "upgrades," then "bad actors," then hot weather causing the machines to slow down because they don't have air conditioning, evil AI companies, and now seems to be the fact that an organization backed by someone with nearly a billion dollars, founded 30 years ago, cannot source hard drives.

https://bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com/post/3musdwx6kqk2c

Fundraising drive coordinated with their loudest employee saying something else, because... of course.

Comment by smolder 6 hours ago

Archive.org. I watched the whole of Norm Macdonalds "cancelled" (in the "cancel culture" sense) show/podcast on there. Oddly, he died a few days after I finished it.

Comment by badlibrarian 5 hours ago

Different site, different backend, different problems. GP was talking about wayback.archive.org, which threw a 429 error just now when I verified the URL.

Comment by qingcharles 1 day ago

Just donated. Appreciate the reminder.

Comment by niuzeta 18 hours ago

I'd been donating $5 for a long time and I just bumped it to $25. These posts are great reminders for passive donators like myself.

Comment by 0x0000F8 19 hours ago

The internet archive is the last bastion of hope for any future independent training data, not to mention archived media in all forms somewhat slows down bias introduction inf information and archives freedom of thought/speech to an extent.

Comment by badlibrarian 1 day ago

If you use the site, support them. If you are a technical person, offer to help them. But maybe cash, or even the proxy of being able to say they have a large number of cash supporters, isn't really what's needed here?

Set up after the lawsuits that nearly wiped out his personal assets, Brewster Kahle's latest foundation shows $743 million in assets.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/991...

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/the-internet-arc...

"Do you do backups too, for example to guard against corrupt data getting mirrored across both copies, or accidental deletion?"

John Gonzalez, Internet Archive infrastructure lead: "We have done experiments to confirm that we can back up large portions of our corpus... but this is not a regular practice for us at this time."

https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/25/20000-hard-drives-on-a-m...

Depending on when you click his feed, the ongoing downtime is due to DDoS attacks, bad actors, AI scrapers, power problems, or now an inability to source hard drives.

https://bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com/post/3musdwx6kqk2c

Comment by motbus3 1 day ago

It might be time for archive.org go not be running on http only

Comment by xyst 1 day ago

Why can’t these wealthy donors funding the "match" just pay a lump sum? Why make IA and other non profits jump through hoops to get the full amount?

Comment by loeg 1 day ago

(They do. The "matching" is just a fundraising gimmick; essentially a lie.)

Comment by spiderfarmer 1 day ago

They should ask the AI scraping companies for donations.

Comment by smolder 1 day ago

They probably have, hence the matching thing.

Comment by threethirtytwo 21 hours ago

how: When you start a recurring donation of $25 or more in September, your initial gift will be matched 2:1.

Does that occur? Who's doing the matching?

Comment by phendrenad2 19 hours ago

Why would I donate money to keep your servers running, when I get my IP blocked for days when I try to view more than 20 archived pages? What utility are you actually providing me? From my perspective, Internet Archive is already defunct. It no longer exists, just a hollow organization pretending to be Internet Archive remains.

Comment by akudha 1 day ago

How do they handle AI slop? If they index AI generated articles, it is just not sustainable, right?

Comment by H3l0s_T3k 21 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by retox 1 day ago

[dead]

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Comment by TekMol 1 day ago

I still don't get how copying copyrighted content to your own website and then asking for donations can be a legal business model. Nor how it can be morally justified.

I get that many people like such an archive to be around for consumption. Me too. But, keeping emotions aside, I can't find a justification to violate the rights of creators.

I'm sure many people here will have the knee-jerk reaction to immediately downvote this question. But I know there are also thoughtful people on HN. If some of you have ideas about the legal and moral justification for archive.org's actions, I would like to hear them.

Comment by neilwilson 1 day ago

Perhaps it is time to recognise that this literal Mickey Mouse law needs to be rebalanced more in favour of the public than the monopolist, as that creates better societal outcomes.

Comment by bawolff 1 day ago

> I still don't get how copying copyrighted content to your own website and then asking for donations can be a legal business model

Because copyright isn't black and white like that. Its a lot more complicated. Its likely a lot of what internet archive is doing is fair use (not all though, they do push the envelope, e.g. their covid library stunt).

As for morally, while that is going to depend on what moral system you subscribe to. Copyright is a relatively recent invention. The bible might say thou shall not steal, but it's likely in context that the bible was fine with copyright infringement. It probably not even something that would have been thought about in a bronze age context.

As far as utilitarianism goes, at first glance seems like Internet archive increases happiness more than it decreases it, so that is a check.

I dont see any reason to think the internet archive violates the Categorical imperative either.

so i guess the question is, under which basis do you believe it to be immoral.

Comment by pjc50 1 day ago

The legal justification is that it's a library. This does actually seem to work for them in general, although they badly overstepped with books and lost in court.

Any creator-based outrage should be directed first and foremost at the for-profit violations by AI companies, rather than the small volunteer service which is keeping history up.

Ultimately there is no archiving without piracy. The alternative is for the web to exist in an eternal present where everything vanishes the moment some business decides it's not worth it or conflicts with current corporate values.

Comment by hk__2 1 day ago

It’s a non-profit that archives publicly-accessible content. If it were a for-profit (Google snippets, LLMs) I’d understand your question, but since it doesn’t profit from it I don’t see the issue.

Comment by beej71 21 hours ago

Morally, the net gain of data preservation and access outweighs the copyright issues. This is especially true for abandoned works. And, morally, the current copyright duration is unacceptable.

Depends on ones morals, of course.

Comment by mitxela 14 hours ago

Did you know copyright law has special exceptions written into it for libraries? Shocking, I know. Ever read it?

Comment by spider-mario 1 day ago

“your own website and then asking for donations […] business model” make it sound as if it’s for profit, which it isn’t.

Comment by foo42 1 day ago

Internet Archive feels like an important... well, archive, yet I often worry about the load, financial and potentially political, which is put on it when people use it as a workaround for pay-walls, as is often advocated on HN

Comment by mr_mitm 1 day ago

That's a different archive

Comment by warpech 1 day ago

Umm, no? The parent means Wayback Machine, which is a service of Internet Archive (both at archive.org). Or am I confused?

Comment by mr_mitm 1 day ago

The archive that bypasses paywalls is archive.today (or archive.is, archive.ph, ...) which is run by some shady person, not a professional organization like Wayback Machine.

Comment by crewman9 1 day ago

Yeah, _no_

Shut ClimateGPT down, apologize and then we can talk about donation.

Comment by eru 1 day ago

Interesting. How is ClimateGPT linked to archive.org, and why do you object to it?

Comment by kalleboo 1 day ago

They're probably reacting to this

https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/11721950124572...

https://erasmus.ai/?p=875

Comment by DaSHacka 1 day ago

LOL it never ceases to amaze me what people on fringe sides of the internet get worked up over.

Actual modern day luddites, it's going to be so hilarious in a couple years from now when they all stop caring about AI and move on to the next 'current thing'.

Comment by mitxela 14 hours ago

The Luddites were right about everything btw

Comment by eru 10 hours ago

Tell me one thing they were right about, please.

Comment by mitxela 1 hour ago

Capitalists would abuse technology to severely depress wages

Comment by stonogo 1 day ago

ClimateGPT is built by Erasmus.AI, which says "Built by Erasmus.AI on behalf of the ClimateGPT Foundation, and supported by the Internet Archive Europe,".

Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive founder (and board chair), is on the board of Erasmus.AI.

It does seem weird to rattle the donation box because hosting costs are going up while shooting money at the prime cause of hosting costs going up.

Comment by LastTrain 1 day ago

They are independent organizations with separate funding.

Comment by crewman9 1 day ago

then why did the main IA account post about this https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/11721950124572...

and it's darkly funny how HN downvotes this when every single answer on Mastodon is incredibly negative

Comment by LastTrain 19 hours ago

I swear sometimes people get so offended by something they stop thinking. It doesn't have to be all or nothing, you know? Like, you can acknowledge that these are two separate and independent organizations while also having the opinion that you don't like what Internet Archive Europe is doing in this one case and that you feel like IA posting about it is a tacit endorsement of the thing you don't like. Maybe it is enough for you to not support them, that's fine, but don't be intellectually dishonest about it.

Comment by tadfisher 1 day ago

It's not funny at all, it's deeply alarming. I'm in the wrong bar.

Comment by GaryBluto 1 day ago

> and it's darkly funny how HN downvotes this when every single answer on Mastodon is incredibly negative

Mastodon is full of, for the lack of a better word, nuts. Every time I've had the displeasurable experience of clinking a link and seeing that dark violet colour cover my screen I know I'm in for either adults who never matured past their early teenage years or ideological hyperpartisanism, and within five seconds my prejudices are confirmed. Social media doesn't magically fill with rational people the moment you "fix" the infrastructure.

Comment by stonogo 1 day ago

Brewster Kahle is on IA Europe's board as well (with Daniel Erasmus, whose baby is Erasmus.AI).

I'm sure they have separate bank accounts, but let's not pretend these organizations are independent. They're all run by the same little club of friends.

Comment by LastTrain 1 day ago

That is Internet Archive Europe, which is independent from Internet Archive

Comment by RileyJames 1 day ago

What should archive.org apologise for in this regard?