IA needs to do what Usenet has done. Have a bunch of mission-aligned but unrelated orgs (under different ownership and distributed around the world) that peer with each other, distribute all the content obtained by any of the orgs to each other, but that have no technical channel nor capability to distribute DMCA complaints and takedown requests.
This is (AFAIK) basically how Usenet piracy works. You send your warez to one provider, and that provider instantly replicates them to all the providers they peer with, recursively, until they eventually reach the entire network. When any of those providers get a DMCA complaint, they remove the offending files (as they're required to do by law), but they don't inform other providers that they've received a DMCA notice, so those providers keep serving those files. This makes it much harder to remove data from the network than it is to add it.
y3ahd0g 7 hours ago [-]
So they should use bit torrent.
IMO personal security would only be improved if we diversified away from "the open web".
"Flood the field" with protocols and pre-shared key networks where we have to generate keys together in meat space, make it too expensive to operate the panopticon.
Everyone putting their eggs in the open web basket, gathering in that public commons means all it takes is one bomb on us all, so to speak.
LocalH 6 hours ago [-]
BitTorrent allows untrusted users (read: industry plants) to connect and slurp down direct IP addresses to swarm participants. It's an unanswered legal question whether low-level uploading (such as the percentages one would get as a "leech", connecting to the torrent and then disconnecting immediately after completion) might fall under "fair use" or "fair dealing" statutes in various jurisdictions.
US-centric here: I feel that uploading a small percentage of a file as a condition of downloading the whole thing may very well fall under fair use - most BT traffic is noncommercial, the portion of the covered work uploaded by "leeches" is very small and probably would be covered by the "30-second" rule often quoted in fair use discussions. The only really arguable point is the "effect on the work's value", but then again an average leech is not uploading enough of the work to have that much of a material effect on the work's value.
mafuy 1 hours ago [-]
In Germany at least, uploading even a single byte of content is illegal. We don't really have Fair Use here; there are only few, very narrow exceptions.
It is also not even required to show that that single byte was uploaded, your IP getting logged as part of the swarm suffices. The burden of proof is on you now. It was much, much worse than in the US.
While all this is technically still true today, a new law a few years ago luckily mostly blocked the path. It was badly needed, because the situation was horribly abused by law firms.
y3ahd0g 4 hours ago [-]
Ok private 1:1 wireguard and syncthing or rsync all the way down then
Softlink data to the appropriate mount
The options are endless and tech nerds can 1:1 help friends and family
Locking the knowledge into corporate silos is a huge security risk. The masses should be just as competent and informed so they don't panic
Minority say over the economy and government is just fascism. These people are not deities. They're normal meat and bone
We have processes to replace politicians and workers; we need processes to replace the rich.
Free speech is a circular right and there is no freedom from consequences of speech. They can face consequences too
fsflover 5 hours ago [-]
Torrents in I2P allow fully anonymous data exchange.
cbdevidal 3 hours ago [-]
I like it in theory but the IA hosts over 175PB of data. Wonder how many other producers could replicate that data.
> Internet Archive Switzerland joins a growing group of mission-aligned organizations, alongside Internet Archive, Internet Archive Canada, and Internet Archive Europe. Together, these independent libraries strengthen a shared vision: building a distributed, resilient digital library for the world.
card_zero 12 hours ago [-]
I was interested in the others, but https://www.internetarchive.eu is a horrible corporate-looking site with a hero image, a boast about AI, a carousel of news that won't scroll with doing its slow scroll animation, a huge "meet the team" section with mugshots and boring profiles, social media links, a newsletter signup form, and nothing to say where the actual archive is.
ferongr 10 hours ago [-]
Looks like an "organization" tailor made to be awarded EU funds for their "mission".
CPLX 9 hours ago [-]
Mysteries abound.
vages 9 hours ago [-]
The .eu branch that card zero criticized seems to be based in Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands (an EU member). Or am I missing something?
wongarsu 7 hours ago [-]
I think people are questioning the "Archive" part, not the "Europe" part of the name
ConceptJunkie 3 hours ago [-]
Somewhere there's a "create a random, soulless, corporate website generator", and these folks used it.
carlosjobim 12 hours ago [-]
Reading what little information they have there, they aren't a public facing or public serving organization. They seem to provide their services to institutions only:
"working with dozens of European libraries and government agencies to build web collections, Internet Archive Europe prioritized collaboration with cultural heritage organizations to safeguard our collective history."
badlibrarian 8 hours ago [-]
Internet Archive runs a completely separate version of their site for paying institutional clients. https://archive-it.org/
In a best case scenario, this eventually becomes the replacement for the (lets be honest) absurdly awful archive.org front and backend.
So: an expansion into the EU market. And yes, a honeypot for grant funds, because why not? Good for them.
casey2 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
justusthane 5 hours ago [-]
I was excited to see there's a Canadian one, but it's just a Wordpress blog?
chorizo 5 hours ago [-]
They do exist and involved in archiving. Someone reached out to our amateur radio club and offered to archive any documents we might have. They even asked to archive the video recording of one of our monthly meetings.
dang 7 hours ago [-]
Thanks! Since the submitted URL https://internetarchive.ch/ seems to be down, I've put your link at the top and moved the other to the toptext.
That website is really struggling. Very tempting to go to a mirror on archive.org to view it :)
This seems very distinct from Internet Archive in the US, I wonder how separate it is.
Internet Archive Canada (I worked there in 2024) operated like it was a subsidiary, even though I think it was technically an independent organization with some shared directors. Same Slack, same archive.org email domain, etc.
IA.ch has Brewster and Caslon on the board.
I suspect that for the political threats of the current decade the different Internet Archive organisations need to start operating more independently, especially when it comes to funding?
crossroadsguy 14 hours ago [-]
They use Slack? I am kind of surprised. But I am sure on the plus side, that would also mean having to worry about one less uptime.
insom 13 hours ago [-]
Slack, Zoom and Google Apps (but not for email) - otherwise basically everything was internally ran.
The Slack has (had?) hundreds of guest accounts due to volunteers and allied organizations. It’s an interesting (and cool) institution!
Intralexical 10 hours ago [-]
Can you share more about your time at the Canadian one? I feel like there was a big hullabaloo about it years ago, but it's not really clear what they do.
insom 9 hours ago [-]
Not sure what hullabaloo -- they do provide a bunch of services to Canadian institutions (including Libraries and Archives Canada) and they perform physical services like book scanning and in the last few years I believe they are the parent organization for the physical Canadian datacentre _somewhere in BC_.
For my work, I worked in their Archiving & Data Services department, on https://archive-it.org/ -- I didn't know this before I joined, but Internet Archive offers various for-pay services to other cultural institutions, mostly around archiving their stuff or white-labelling playback of archives.
On one hand this is neat, as IA have expertise around this, but on the other hand (as a Canadian) I don't like that it's not actually sovereign and that it looks like it's run by our government but that it's not. Tradeoffs, I guess.
catlikesshrimp 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jedberg 10 hours ago [-]
You can't register a ch domain with fewer than 3 characters. It's showing as available because that thing that checks available only looks if it's registered, not if it's allowed.
rayhaanj 6 hours ago [-]
Technically they’re used for the Cantons so to register a two letter CH subdomain you first need to register a new Swiss Canton!
Barbing 11 hours ago [-]
Abbreviated internetarchive.ch ?
catlikesshrimp 10 hours ago [-]
URLs don't admit abbreviations. "url shorteners" are page redirects.
adrianmonk 9 hours ago [-]
They are suggesting that a human used an abbreviation rather than making a typo.
catlikesshrimp 9 hours ago [-]
"Using abbreviations" of URLs is pointing to *wrong* addresses. A phishing attempt can perfectly use this misconception. This is not even malpractice.
I am not saying the user in question is malicious. I am sorry to repeat myself, but URLs don't admit abbreviations
Barbing 6 hours ago [-]
Wait was that right in the sibling comment
stackghost 9 hours ago [-]
Oh, so you admit to purposely playing dense by asking if it was a typo, to obliquely make a pedantic argument about phishing?
I hate this fucking website sometimes.
insom 9 hours ago [-]
Thanks for trying. I assumed that ia.ch was clearly shorthand for internetarchive.ch but maybe one can't assume anything.
Barbing 6 hours ago [-]
Assumed same.
Good point we shouldn’t abbreviate URLs in case they get typosquatted? Just raised in a very indirect fashion
9 hours ago [-]
teew 9 hours ago [-]
The About Us section states:
> We are a team of change-makers who believe that every helping hand can raise a child and create a better future for them.
Which I found weird. And searching for this phrase yields many site-hits verbatim, which is even weirder. Anyone know what is up with that? Is it some kind of filler text?
Edit: I guess it's from a template, the Contact section is also mumbo-jumbo (address: 123 Fifth Avenue, NY and so on).
malicka 8 hours ago [-]
That doesn’t exactly instill confidence, honestly…
anant-singhal 21 minutes ago [-]
The uncomfortable part is that “preserving knowledge” sounds universally good until copyright law present themselves.
imtomt 9 hours ago [-]
Huh. I can’t find the actual... archive. It mentions an AI archive less than 10 sentences in, and has a couple of links, but seems void of any actually archived content.
Ah, good, they are also mirroring the page load speed of the internet archive
trvz 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
4ggr0 12 hours ago [-]
a dev from ZH would've added a blockchain, mobile app and hosted it on an over-allocated kubernetes cluster. 97% uptime and you need a macbook pro so the website doesn't stutter.
shermantanktop 11 hours ago [-]
A south-of-the-Limmat Migros shopper would use React and Vercel, but still use raw JS Date.
colinmegill 9 hours ago [-]
If you are running that thing, and reading this post: just do the right thing and get your own name.
We’re just constantly in denial that the internet actually does the thing we want it to do.
The internet archive is an excellent demonstration of how to do it.
It’s primarily getting a ragtag group to pool resources and manage them and then gossip with other groups that are doing the same thing.
I’ve spent so much time around the archive that I plainly see a divide between internet people online that can’t connect the dots and internet people in real life that are confused as to why the dots aren’t connecting.
The easiest way to see the dots is to:
1. Stop trying to make money
2. Tally the things that cost money
3. Amortize the upkeep over time
E.g. where do we source resources from, where do we store resources and how do we secure them.
Like HTTP, but for physical materials, not digital.
zbentley 1 minutes ago [-]
That's not what is meant by "decentralization".
None of those things help with the problem of centralization. Centralization isn't limited to moneymaking enterprises, or the modern internet. A centralized server operated by donations for free can just as easily go down, be seized by law enforcement, have its domain or internet service taken offline by government action, and so on.
The internet is not the thing we want (or not sufficient alone), because the internet's resources, and the communication systems between them, are largely centralized.
6 hours ago [-]
Intralexical 9 hours ago [-]
They've been constantly trying to set up P2P solutions. Torrents, DWEB, IPFS, Filecoin, WebTorrent, YJS, whole bunch of tech acronyms. I'm not sure much of it has really caught on?
Very proud of my alma mater town to be a place for this. It’s much needed infrastructure for Europe.
damnitbuilds 1 days ago [-]
"Its efforts will initially focus on [...] and collecting the generative AI wave that is currently upon us all."
Why would they want to collect the AI wave ?!
But about time the Internet Archive had a US-independent backup.
kinow 1 days ago [-]
> But about time the Internet Archive had a US-independent backup.
Agreed!
> The Internet Archive Switzerland, online at https://internetarchive.ch/, is a newly-formed Swiss non-profit foundation that will operate independently within its national context.
Let's hope they don't use Google captcha and KYC everyone.
arian_ 11 hours ago [-]
Finally a Swiss account I can afford to open.
ok123456 9 hours ago [-]
Where's the search bar at the top to search the archive?
Vasbarlog 14 hours ago [-]
Hugged to death? I can’t access the page.
AndroTux 13 hours ago [-]
They just want everyone coming from archive.org to feel right at home
embedding-shape 14 hours ago [-]
Have you tried just letting it load? Took maybe more than 30 seconds for the page to load for me, but it did load eventually.
Hendrikto 14 hours ago [-]
Same for me. I cannot access it either.
KomoD 13 hours ago [-]
Yep, just loading forever.
alessandroberna 14 hours ago [-]
Seems likely, same for me.
14 hours ago [-]
pedroneto3 10 hours ago [-]
I am able too
sixie6e 14 hours ago [-]
I am able to.
latenightcoding 8 hours ago [-]
>> Gen AI ARchive
isn't this a nightmare for privacy
8 hours ago [-]
ukanhaupa 9 hours ago [-]
cool!
12 hours ago [-]
7777777phil 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
huflungdung 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
14 hours ago [-]
feiz45607 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
idovmamane 10 hours ago [-]
St Gallen has been archiving knowledge for over a thousand years. Now they are archiving AI models before they get retrained out of existence. The location is not a coincidence…
zkmon 12 hours ago [-]
Anything that is being built today, based on the assumptions about the future that extend into multiple years, is bound to fade away. Because the "future no longer what it used be". What's the envisaged future context and purpose where this would save the world?
Rendered at 02:29:56 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
This is (AFAIK) basically how Usenet piracy works. You send your warez to one provider, and that provider instantly replicates them to all the providers they peer with, recursively, until they eventually reach the entire network. When any of those providers get a DMCA complaint, they remove the offending files (as they're required to do by law), but they don't inform other providers that they've received a DMCA notice, so those providers keep serving those files. This makes it much harder to remove data from the network than it is to add it.
IMO personal security would only be improved if we diversified away from "the open web".
"Flood the field" with protocols and pre-shared key networks where we have to generate keys together in meat space, make it too expensive to operate the panopticon.
Everyone putting their eggs in the open web basket, gathering in that public commons means all it takes is one bomb on us all, so to speak.
US-centric here: I feel that uploading a small percentage of a file as a condition of downloading the whole thing may very well fall under fair use - most BT traffic is noncommercial, the portion of the covered work uploaded by "leeches" is very small and probably would be covered by the "30-second" rule often quoted in fair use discussions. The only really arguable point is the "effect on the work's value", but then again an average leech is not uploading enough of the work to have that much of a material effect on the work's value.
It is also not even required to show that that single byte was uploaded, your IP getting logged as part of the swarm suffices. The burden of proof is on you now. It was much, much worse than in the US.
While all this is technically still true today, a new law a few years ago luckily mostly blocked the path. It was badly needed, because the situation was horribly abused by law firms.
Softlink data to the appropriate mount
The options are endless and tech nerds can 1:1 help friends and family
Locking the knowledge into corporate silos is a huge security risk. The masses should be just as competent and informed so they don't panic
Minority say over the economy and government is just fascism. These people are not deities. They're normal meat and bone
We have processes to replace politicians and workers; we need processes to replace the rich.
Free speech is a circular right and there is no freedom from consequences of speech. They can face consequences too
> Internet Archive Switzerland joins a growing group of mission-aligned organizations, alongside Internet Archive, Internet Archive Canada, and Internet Archive Europe. Together, these independent libraries strengthen a shared vision: building a distributed, resilient digital library for the world.
"working with dozens of European libraries and government agencies to build web collections, Internet Archive Europe prioritized collaboration with cultural heritage organizations to safeguard our collective history."
In a best case scenario, this eventually becomes the replacement for the (lets be honest) absurdly awful archive.org front and backend.
So: an expansion into the EU market. And yes, a honeypot for grant funds, because why not? Good for them.
This seems very distinct from Internet Archive in the US, I wonder how separate it is.
Internet Archive Canada (I worked there in 2024) operated like it was a subsidiary, even though I think it was technically an independent organization with some shared directors. Same Slack, same archive.org email domain, etc.
IA.ch has Brewster and Caslon on the board.
I suspect that for the political threats of the current decade the different Internet Archive organisations need to start operating more independently, especially when it comes to funding?
The Slack has (had?) hundreds of guest accounts due to volunteers and allied organizations. It’s an interesting (and cool) institution!
For my work, I worked in their Archiving & Data Services department, on https://archive-it.org/ -- I didn't know this before I joined, but Internet Archive offers various for-pay services to other cultural institutions, mostly around archiving their stuff or white-labelling playback of archives.
For example https://webarchiveweb.bac-lac.canada.ca/ (the Government of Canada's own Internet Archive) is actually outsourced to ADS within Internet Archive.
On one hand this is neat, as IA have expertise around this, but on the other hand (as a Canadian) I don't like that it's not actually sovereign and that it looks like it's run by our government but that it's not. Tradeoffs, I guess.
I am not saying the user in question is malicious. I am sorry to repeat myself, but URLs don't admit abbreviations
I hate this fucking website sometimes.
Good point we shouldn’t abbreviate URLs in case they get typosquatted? Just raised in a very indirect fashion
> We are a team of change-makers who believe that every helping hand can raise a child and create a better future for them.
Which I found weird. And searching for this phrase yields many site-hits verbatim, which is even weirder. Anyone know what is up with that? Is it some kind of filler text?
Edit: I guess it's from a template, the Contact section is also mumbo-jumbo (address: 123 Fifth Avenue, NY and so on).
If tpb dot org can still exist ...
At least these people tried. We need a p2p archive solution ASAP. Before our history is entirely re-written.
No one has cracked this one yet.
The internet itself is the thing we want.
We’re just constantly in denial that the internet actually does the thing we want it to do.
The internet archive is an excellent demonstration of how to do it.
It’s primarily getting a ragtag group to pool resources and manage them and then gossip with other groups that are doing the same thing.
I’ve spent so much time around the archive that I plainly see a divide between internet people online that can’t connect the dots and internet people in real life that are confused as to why the dots aren’t connecting.
The easiest way to see the dots is to:
1. Stop trying to make money
2. Tally the things that cost money
3. Amortize the upkeep over time
E.g. where do we source resources from, where do we store resources and how do we secure them.
Like HTTP, but for physical materials, not digital.
None of those things help with the problem of centralization. Centralization isn't limited to moneymaking enterprises, or the modern internet. A centralized server operated by donations for free can just as easily go down, be seized by law enforcement, have its domain or internet service taken offline by government action, and so on.
The internet is not the thing we want (or not sufficient alone), because the internet's resources, and the communication systems between them, are largely centralized.
https://blog.archive.org/tag/decentralized-web/
https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-transports
Third-party attempt:
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK
Turns out it's hard! Or maybe just too niche. But you can also help them today, by seeding some of collections that are available as torrents.
I have neither the technical nor financial abilities to address this problem.
However, as one of the greatest technical collectives of all time, the users of this website might be capable of doing such a thing.
This is likely the greatest challenge of our time.
The one in Egypt doesn't get updated.
Why would they want to collect the AI wave ?!
But about time the Internet Archive had a US-independent backup.
Agreed!
> The Internet Archive Switzerland, online at https://internetarchive.ch/, is a newly-formed Swiss non-profit foundation that will operate independently within its national context.
I think the Wikipedia Editors will have to decide whether they will add it to the existing page. The Operations section is still listing only U.S. data centers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#Operations
isn't this a nightmare for privacy