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 : ).
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 issues 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 I can't 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 uniquely valuable resource. It's strange to risk it as a motte for the bailey of copyright abolition activism.
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.
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.
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.
COVID was a particularly treacherous period for a lot of humans. Replying as myself, not my employer. I’m not offering an opinion about the program, as I was not directly involved; I’m only noting circumstances that I think are often under-considered or misrepresented.
1. The state of access.
Tens of thousands of public schools and libraries in the United States and across the globe were suddenly mandated to shut their doors, leaving many students, parents, and teachers to fend for themselves, to learn from home, and unequipped with access to the physical resources many needed. Meanwhile, thousands of public libraries across the United States who had these resources were forced to closed their doors, meaning tens of millions of books the public had paid for became unavailable. Many of these public good organizations appealed for some way to solve the unique access challenges created by these unprecedented circumstances, which connects to point number 2.
2. Who was involved.
The details regarding how a decision is reached, and whether its made independently or unilaterally or with input and comment, are relevant when forming an opinion. In my experience, many people opine on this topic before researching this point. In 2020, more than 100 public institutions and libraries who were affected by COVID, joined in endorsing some temporary way to offer students, parents, and educators relief by connecting them with resources they had lost access to:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Found out yesterday that Switzerland has extremely lax laws about copyright. You are actually permitted to pirate movies and shows all you want, as long as you don't share the copyrighted media outright.
The Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property explicitly says:
downloading or streaming works for private use is permitted even when the source is illegal.
What bothers me most is the off-handedness of it all. They pop into the conversation like whack-a-mole a say "end copyright", yet offer no reasonable alternatives. Are we suddenly going to stop paying authors for their artistic works? It is crazy. Copyright laws are fundamental to create thriving creative industries.
I think archiving the world's books is as valuable as websites. Many books represent years of an author's life writing authoritatively on a subject. And there are a staggering number of books (especially before 1980) that are simply disappearing from the public record.
As book production goes digital and titles are increasingly sold as digital "leases" that customers and libraries don't own (i.e. kindle, libby, etc), it's becoming more and not less challenging (counter-intuitively) for libraries to archive and preserve books into the future.
And that's not a coincidence. And I wouldn't be surprised if we continue to see a steep uptick of similar challenges for archiving the web.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Copyright is a legal grant from the public to the individual.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?).
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.)
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.
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€).
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.
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.
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.
That wouldn't be a SEPA transfer since it's an pound account. SEPA is one implementation of the general concept of wire transfer, for eurozone accounts to other eurozone accounts.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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
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.)
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!
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.
> 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 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 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.
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.
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 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 it's not a big deal, we're met with "but hundreds of thousands of people might think 'oh, darn'" for a moment!
> 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
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 :) ).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> and Rich people get to think they are helping 3$'s worth...
If you itemize, you get to deduct charitable contributions used as matching funds from your federal income tax due. I suggest a donor advised fund for these folks.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The 2:1 match scheme is needed to (a) accept large donation and (b) maintain 501c3 "public support" threshold. It's not a marketing gimmick, it's ubiquitous since it's basically tax law.
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).
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:
(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)
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.
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.
(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)
"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?
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.
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].
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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).
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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.
For the past several years, this annualizes to about three weeks of free winter heating (via bespoke XMR). I mine solo, but I imagine if you "pooled" it would be similar incomestream (but more reliable). I have had a year of "no winnings," but I persist with the odds to warm myself and the network.
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Half of my kilohashing runs on obsolete i5 equipment (==free-to-me, minus geektime) – Monero Foundation strives to operate with GPU- & ASIC- –resistance; processors haven't gotten that much faster (in the past decade), and a surplus i5 isn't that much slower than a new $500 Ryzen.
It is definitely not worth purchasing additional equipment, with residential rates, just to mine monero. I like warm toes, and have lots of spare CPU cores.
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Reminder: this is only "free electricity" if you're offsetting RESISTIVE HEATING (i.e. not a heatpump). To actually reduce your powerbill and save the planet (the smarter choice), you should install a heatpump for wintertime heating.
The building is heated by heat pumps my studio is one large room in the building 60’x 30’ 25’ (20m x 10m x 8m). This would be where some oomph is needed.
Honestly, this is a perfect use-case for the old MacPros (2009-2012) with the dual Xeon configuration – they are notorious for their loud fans and exhorbitant powerbills.
You can usually get one for free (or less, "doing them a favor") via social media. I just gave one away (because the receiver had a better use for it than my XMR mining).
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.
"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."
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.
235 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 9.8 ms ] threadDoes it change the calculus at all if this "innocent" person was trying to dox the operator for nothing more than satisfying a personal whim?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#2026_attack_on_G...
I don't think we should be supporting this random guy, no.
to DDOS one website, which is doxxing the owner. Not that it makes it good idea, but it's a little more understandable.
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.
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...
Is this really that hard to understand?
One guy blocking a single country is not at all problematic.
Edit: of course you should donate Monero
Stop hiding public data and I might reconsider.
Shut ClimateGPT down, apologize and then we can talk about donation.
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 uniquely valuable resource. It's strange to risk it as a motte for the bailey of copyright abolition activism.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...
USD millions. Legal is non-employee costs.It's happened:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachette_v._Internet_Archive
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Music_Group_v._Inter...
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.
1. The state of access.
Tens of thousands of public schools and libraries in the United States and across the globe were suddenly mandated to shut their doors, leaving many students, parents, and teachers to fend for themselves, to learn from home, and unequipped with access to the physical resources many needed. Meanwhile, thousands of public libraries across the United States who had these resources were forced to closed their doors, meaning tens of millions of books the public had paid for became unavailable. Many of these public good organizations appealed for some way to solve the unique access challenges created by these unprecedented circumstances, which connects to point number 2.
2. Who was involved.
The details regarding how a decision is reached, and whether its made independently or unilaterally or with input and comment, are relevant when forming an opinion. In my experience, many people opine on this topic before researching this point. In 2020, more than 100 public institutions and libraries who were affected by COVID, joined in endorsing some temporary way to offer students, parents, and educators relief by connecting them with resources they had lost access to:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vkl3RX4CzpRTQsoG1tsdHC0f...
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.
As book production goes digital and titles are increasingly sold as digital "leases" that customers and libraries don't own (i.e. kindle, libby, etc), it's becoming more and not less challenging (counter-intuitively) for libraries to archive and preserve books into the future.
And that's not a coincidence. And I wouldn't be surprised if we continue to see a steep uptick of similar challenges for archiving the web.
https://bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com/post/3musdwx6kqk2c
Fundraising drive coordinated with their loudest employee saying something else, because... of course.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Depends on ones morals, of course.
Source: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-wire-transfer/
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.
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.
You clipped it, but it's GB74RBOS... and the RBOS stands for Royal Bank Of Scotland.
https://wise.com/gb/iban/uk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area#Cove...
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?
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.
This is unhinged. Then I can chargeback at McDonald’s because the burger doesn’t look the same as the picture.
However I believe they have an easy cancel button if your donation is associated with an IA account, too.
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.
> When you start a recurring donation of $25 or more in September, your initial gift will be matched 2:1.
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.
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).
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.
Some card issuers let you temporarily lock down the card.
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
- Capable
- Reliable
- Free
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.
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.)
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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 it's not a big deal, we're met with "but hundreds of thousands of people might think 'oh, darn'" for a moment!
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.
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 :) ).
> 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.
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.
Also why arent they on opencollective? Surely thats a no brainer!
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!
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.
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.
If you itemize, you get to deduct charitable contributions used as matching funds from your federal income tax due. I suggest a donor advised fund for these folks.
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.
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.
I am not going to cry because the CEO cannot afford a yacht payment next month.
PayPal and Stripe are doing it too now.
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…
If I say I’m going to match other people’s money 2:1 and that convinces people donate $90, I give $180 and that charity yields $270.
Why? If i had the money, I would do the same.
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.
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).
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)
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)
"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?
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].
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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).
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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.
Localized beneath my main office computer desk, this allows me to further reduce heating of my entire domicile.
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Half of my kilohashing runs on obsolete i5 equipment (==free-to-me, minus geektime) – Monero Foundation strives to operate with GPU- & ASIC- –resistance; processors haven't gotten that much faster (in the past decade), and a surplus i5 isn't that much slower than a new $500 Ryzen.
It is definitely not worth purchasing additional equipment, with residential rates, just to mine monero. I like warm toes, and have lots of spare CPU cores.
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Reminder: this is only "free electricity" if you're offsetting RESISTIVE HEATING (i.e. not a heatpump). To actually reduce your powerbill and save the planet (the smarter choice), you should install a heatpump for wintertime heating.
You can usually get one for free (or less, "doing them a favor") via social media. I just gave one away (because the receiver had a better use for it than my XMR mining).
https://blog.dshr.org/2026/01/internet-archives-storage.html
https://blog.dshr.org/2021/03/internet-archive-storage.html
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