Of course they are? PIR is American.

Yes, and they always have been.

thepiratebay.org is still up

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.

That seems a tad judgmental.

Anna is welcome here on the Group W bench.

In that case it would be Elsevier and co.

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.

also have the feeling that going for music is going to turn out badly

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.

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.

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.

Check their gitlab for bounties. They have a lot of money in reserves to be spent on that. There are a few open bounties for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I've also worked on a bounty for them once and can confirm they have plenty more money in their budget. So I believe that they don't pocket donations, or at least not a very large portion of them.

Do you mean, intentionally? It's an interesting question; is there any evidence?

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...

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.

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.

Then I need to try it again. I've found it pretty useless compared to NexusSTC for recent papers

There is no requirement for a non-profit organisation to be registered.

I don't think the kind of crowd IPFS attracts would wanna use the default config. Most ould choose to configure according to their setup.

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.

By pedantry, you mean "pointing out completely misusing terms and falsehoods about UK law", right?

> Both I and GP have pointed out the crux of the matter

"They're not 'a' non-profit".

> and you are ignoring it.

No. I am challenging it.

I've seen no evidence either way and so far it seems nor have you. So let's wait and see.

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.

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.

Your link only shows past 5 years, so you're missing the hayday of music piracy, was this intentional?

Try this: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s...

Try with any music piracy (or hell, piracy in general) related search terms and you'll see a similar trend.

> 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?

> 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).

link the chart here, so I can take a look.

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.

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".

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.

Hey, that's the same Namecheap that banned Russian citizens for being Russian in 2022? Nice to hear they're still principled.

That's valid, and I think a point that Cloudflare itself has acknowledged. Cloudflare is, however not quite as fundamental as domain names.

See https://how-nostr-works.pages.dev/#/pathological

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".

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.

All the links between .onion sites broke when the relay and other infrastructure operators started running the broken (no Torv2 support) releases the Tor Project put out. All the writings of sites about each other. Everything that made it a web.

It doesn't matter that it was technical possible to try to manually reach out to random visitors of my sites and try to tell them that the entire domain name was changing. That didn't fix the web or links aspect at all.

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.

Oh I forgot that running Tor doesn't automatically route traffic through it. My mistake, sorry.

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?

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.

Having a sense of morality is not a problem. Good for them.

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.

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.

I love that show! Jack has an infectious take on all the criminal antics! He is able to, for the most part, interview them in a non judgemental way. I fine his style clear and well produced!

Very highly recommended!

I would urge people to not go there at all. Their moderation is imo pretty lacking, and malware sometimes slips by. There are much safer pirate websites out there (although you should still only visit them with uBlock Origin installed)

It is ridiculously easy to create an album with Suno and push it Spotify. I'm surprised its only 66% TBH

From a stat I saw years ago, about the same amount of apps on the iOS app store have never been downloaded.

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)?

Very hard if you have little talent..

> 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.

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.

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.

To improve user experience, Nostr clients typically pre-load several large relays. In fact, Nostr also supports using NIP-19[1] pointers to pass custom relay hints to the client, similar to the tracker in BitTorrent and Magnet. Furthermore, I believe that with Let's Encrypt now offering free and widespread IP certificates, domain dependency issues will be further alleviated on Nostr.

[1]: https://nips.nostr.com/19

Darknet term is mostly used to refer onion services, which have been around since 2004. Freenet was never meant for anonymity, both have separate goals.

>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".

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...

> 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.

> 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.

I agree, it's surprising. Even in California of all places, you can make a one-off vehicle at home and register it for legal road use, without even needing modern safety or emissions equipment:

https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/registering-as-a...

Another even more common strategy is to "restore" a classic car using some extremely small number of parts from some really old pre-emissions and pre-safety equipment car. This is often done for hod rods, dune buggies, etc. where it will be, say a "1930 Ford" but contain only some minuscule amount of that original car it is titled and registered as. There's a sizable industry of homemade "kit cars" that require you to start with a legally registered VW Beetle, but ultimately they often retain nothing except parts of the thin sheet metal floor pan, and somehow that is apparently legal.

It doesn't create problems for large companies that make AI systems.

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.

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.

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?

And a lot more expensive per book than buying, digitizing, and destroying the physical copy. Which was ruled legal.

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.

> They are, but archiving without publishing is pointless.

One may collect/archive now (when the data is, well, "available"), and publish later, when copyright expires and the material will likely be harder to obtain.

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

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.

Linking to illegal services can be illegal, that’s why.

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).

Why should registrar/ISP fold?

It's not that they should, they often do though.

> 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.

> 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.

You're a (waaay) outlier.

Sure, but I'm sure you've heard of Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber.

Traditional radio mostly sucks, but Soma.fm and KEXP are both great for discovering new music.

They can also just create a new foundation elsewhere if the US becomes hostile.

What country does Anna’s archive operate in?