Seems like great publicity for Anna's Archive. I've heard an increasing amount about Anna's Archive over the last 12 months. It has popped up a lot. I wonder if they've seen their traffic spike a lot.
And that's why helping torrenting and seeding the content of AA is vital: they can take down a domain name but not block everyone who seeds.
I said this before but if you've got some spare GB/TB on a computer/server, consider "donating" it for culture preservation purposes:https://annas-archive.se/torre nts
Is this an abuse of the ServerHold status? Was this the same mechanism used to delist a Gaza video archive recently?
> This status code is set by your domain's Registry Operator. Your domain is not activated in the DNS.
> If you provided delegation information (name servers), this status may indicate an issue with your domain that needs resolution. If so, you should contact your registrar to request more information. If your domain does not have any issues, but you need it to resolve in the DNS, you must first contact your registrar in order to provide the necessary delegation information.
In that case, it was the registrar (not the TLD owner) that put the domain under clientHold and clientTransferProhibited, etc (which disables DNS lookups).
The Genocide.live site is now back up (just yesterday) after they raised a fuss on social media, and were able to get the domain unlocked to transfer it to Trustname (out of Estonia) as their new registrar.
(The Namecheap founder/CEO Richard Kirkendall surprisingly came across as surprisingly unaware of how anything to do with domain name registries, TLDs, and DNS works on Twitter in an exchange where he thought the entity running the .live gTLD was the archive's new registrar [1], claimed the domain was unlocked for transfer when it was still on clientHold [2], and a raft of other silly mistakes.)
Used to work for a registry. Registries do not just arbitrarily serverHold things they don't like. Even in blatant abuse cases, they'll reach out to the registrar to clientHold it or delete it instead.
I suspect this came from a court order. The only time I remember serverHolding things were from court orders or other legal requests(FBI/DHS/etc). Though the latter would often just ask for the nameservers to be changed instead.
> Was this the same mechanism used to delist a Gaza video archive recently?
The mechanism used to shut down a website whose videos were fake and that was funded by actual terrorists? I don’t think Anna’s Archive is in the same category, no.
I recommend Anna's Archive get a Nostr account. Once they finally have a solid court order to seize domains, generally the rate at which they get seized accelerates greatly. Nostr is the only decentralized manner (no, Mastodon/fediverse is dependent on domain names, which are getting seized by courts in relation to this -- it is not decentralized at all when it comes down to it) that people can reliably use to have a latest content feed distributed.
"Check Wikipedia to evade the court order" just encourages legal action against Wikipedia. Even linking to copyright violations is, under current court precedent, able to bring civil liability upon third parties. It is draconian and our framers would have considered it a clear First Amendment violation, but unfortunately the current jurisprudence says that is the law.
Some sites like Anna's Archive have .onion site for the Tor network, and others do not. Is there a considerable downside (DDOS?) to providing access to their site by those means?
Excuse my FUD, but are they really non-profit as described in FAQ?
I find it a little hard to believe given how aggressive they are at marketing the paid version.
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.
I always wonder why sites like Anna's Archive (and a lot of torrent tracker sites) don't provide .onion addresses. I imagine a significant proportion of their traffic comes from the Tor network, and onion addresses don't have this same weakness that regular DNS addresses have as they're just the key. I can't imagine if they have the servers already up and running, running an .onion address is that much more work considering the resilience it would add and it's existence may even encourage users to access through Tor if they promote it as the primary address.
They could also potentially write their latest address to the Ethereum blockchain instead, assuming there is a client that could scan and resolve. This would be bulletproof.
Well! Not really a surprise, is it? We knew that DNS censorship was coming sooner or later. The real surprise is that it lasted so long. X509 (TLS) PKI is also probably being abused right now. We know how differently the administration sees services like these that are actually beneficial to humanity. Choosing to rely on services like DNS and PKI exclusively for the function they provide is a very bad idea going forward for us normies.
We should have considered these centralized and corporate driven core infrastructure components as interim measures while more independent alternatives were being developed. We have a few different alternatives right now. Can't we just choose one and switch over? (something not based on blockchains.) Something like GNU Name System, may be?
PS: They will probably block the IP if Server hold/DNS block is not useful anymore. That's a different problem though.
I wonder if in the interim period between DNS blocks and full IP bans, some websites will start distributing their IP addresses directly as the "official" way to connect to them.
The question is, how will you obtain that IP address from them? DNS was the answer to that question. So when you ask that question again, you're effectively asking for a DNS alternative.
54 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 85.1 ms ] threadI wonder how wikipedia feels being used as DNS?
EDIT: Apparently this is a well known practice. Some interesting discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40008383
Can’t imagine they care too much given they themselves also run public dns servers.
I said this before but if you've got some spare GB/TB on a computer/server, consider "donating" it for culture preservation purposes:https://annas-archive.se/torre nts
And I don't mean the copyrighted part (I don't care about that) but the actual content which might be questionable
> This status code is set by your domain's Registry Operator. Your domain is not activated in the DNS.
> If you provided delegation information (name servers), this status may indicate an issue with your domain that needs resolution. If so, you should contact your registrar to request more information. If your domain does not have any issues, but you need it to resolve in the DNS, you must first contact your registrar in order to provide the necessary delegation information.
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/epp-status-codes-2014-...
In that case, it was the registrar (not the TLD owner) that put the domain under clientHold and clientTransferProhibited, etc (which disables DNS lookups).
The Genocide.live site is now back up (just yesterday) after they raised a fuss on social media, and were able to get the domain unlocked to transfer it to Trustname (out of Estonia) as their new registrar.
(The Namecheap founder/CEO Richard Kirkendall surprisingly came across as surprisingly unaware of how anything to do with domain name registries, TLDs, and DNS works on Twitter in an exchange where he thought the entity running the .live gTLD was the archive's new registrar [1], claimed the domain was unlocked for transfer when it was still on clientHold [2], and a raft of other silly mistakes.)
[0]: https://neosmart.net/blog/namecheap-com-revokes-domain-hosti...
[1]: https://x.com/namecheapceo123/status/2007139737379934559?s=2...
[2]: https://x.com/namecheapceo123/status/2007228146060259365?s=2... yet https://x.com/receipts_lol/status/2007984691476156443?s=20
I suspect this came from a court order. The only time I remember serverHolding things were from court orders or other legal requests(FBI/DHS/etc). Though the latter would often just ask for the nameservers to be changed instead.
The mechanism used to shut down a website whose videos were fake and that was funded by actual terrorists? I don’t think Anna’s Archive is in the same category, no.
"Check Wikipedia to evade the court order" just encourages legal action against Wikipedia. Even linking to copyright violations is, under current court precedent, able to bring civil liability upon third parties. It is draconian and our framers would have considered it a clear First Amendment violation, but unfortunately the current jurisprudence says that is the law.
https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/ipns/
(as found on https://library-access.sk/#useful_link_tab)
Nation-state hackers deliver malware from "bulletproof" blockchains - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45860258 - November 2025
We should have considered these centralized and corporate driven core infrastructure components as interim measures while more independent alternatives were being developed. We have a few different alternatives right now. Can't we just choose one and switch over? (something not based on blockchains.) Something like GNU Name System, may be?
PS: They will probably block the IP if Server hold/DNS block is not useful anymore. That's a different problem though.