Keep Our Servers Running

668 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by sonicrocketman
(blog.archive.org)

165 Comments

badlibrarian

3 minutes ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

prirun

an hour ago

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

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

theletterf

7 hours ago

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

MaxLeiter

6 hours ago

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

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

jeltz

2 hours ago

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

ajross

44 minutes ago

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

shevy-java

6 hours ago

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

miki123211

an hour ago

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

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

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

John7878781

7 hours ago

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

coldpie

an hour ago

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

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

jrmg

an hour ago

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

theletterf

7 hours ago

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

Melatonic

6 hours ago

You often still can actually. Call your bank

theletterf

6 hours ago

Just did. Not possible in Spain.

embedding-shape

6 hours ago

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

eis

5 hours ago

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

theletterf

5 hours ago

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

eis

3 hours ago

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

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

Honestly, sounds like everything is as it should be?

miki123211

an hour ago

Exactly this.

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

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

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

zetanor

8 hours ago

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

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

klamann

7 hours ago

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

Medowar

6 hours ago

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

ThePowerOfFuet

6 hours ago

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

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

klamann

5 hours ago

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

edelbitter

2 hours ago

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

klamann

2 hours ago

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

edelbitter

an hour ago

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

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

ThePowerOfFuet

34 minutes ago

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

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

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

eis

5 hours ago

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

47282847

5 hours ago

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

tossandthrow

3 hours ago

2:1 by who? That is not written.

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

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

Just give the money!

conformist

3 hours ago

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

miki123211

an hour ago

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

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

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

minraws

3 hours ago

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

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

1:3 2:3

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

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

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

jeltz

2 hours ago

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

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

itake

2 hours ago

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

0/ marketing

1/ credibility. Someone wealthy thinks the charity is important

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

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

DrewADesign

an hour ago

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

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

Sweepi

an hour ago

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

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

bawolff

3 hours ago

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

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

zikduruqe

3 hours ago

Just like my local grocery store.

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

devilbunny

2 hours ago

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

zikduruqe

27 minutes ago

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

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

fizzbuzzbarbazz

3 hours ago

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

hkpack

2 hours ago

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

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

oefrha

3 hours ago

> That is not written.

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

pm90

10 hours ago

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

Cider9986

10 hours ago

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

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

https://liberapay.com/archiveis/donate

https://coindrop.to/archive

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

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

LeoPanthera

10 hours ago

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

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

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

agile-gift0262

5 hours ago

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

progval

8 hours ago

> to DDOS sites the owner doesn't agree with

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

bulder

8 hours ago

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

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

dakolli

7 hours ago

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

wongarsu

3 hours ago

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

bawolff

3 hours ago

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

nosrepa

2 hours ago

Have you seen this current administration?

DaSHacka

an hour ago

You realize the CIA is nonpartisan, right?

SXX

6 hours ago

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

dakolli

6 hours ago

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

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

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

bulder

4 hours ago

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

DaSHacka

an hour ago

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

Is this really that hard to understand?

dakolli

an hour ago

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

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

radicalcentrist

7 hours ago

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

RobotToaster

6 hours ago

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

forestingfisher

7 hours ago

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

Hamuko

7 hours ago

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

forestingfisher

7 hours ago

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

Cider9986

9 hours ago

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

jan_m_savage

3 hours ago

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

andai

9 hours ago

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

markasoftware

9 hours ago

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

plorg

9 hours ago

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

Cider9986

8 hours ago

Wikipedia links these as the mirrors.

archive.today

archive.fo

archive.is

archive.li

archive.md

archive.ph

archive.vn

archiveiya74codqgiixo33q62qlrqtkgmcitqx5u2oeqnmn5bpcbiyd.onion

topato

8 hours ago

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

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

p91paul

5 hours ago

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

vachina

4 hours ago

Do you have an example of such cases happening?

qingcharles

10 hours ago

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

esskay

5 hours ago

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

vachina

4 hours ago

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

esskay

2 hours ago

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

DaSHacka

an hour ago

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

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

botanical

7 hours ago

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

DaSHacka

an hour ago

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

Hamuko

36 minutes ago

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

esskay

5 hours ago

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

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

arjie

10 hours ago

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

thechairman12

9 hours ago

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

anilakar

7 hours ago

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

Stop hiding public data and I might reconsider.

eru

10 hours ago

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

yreg

2 hours ago

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

queenkjuul

9 hours ago

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

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

smolder

an hour ago

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

totalconfusion

10 hours ago

Who's paying?

killingtime74

10 hours ago

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

Daneel_

8 hours ago

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

lukeify

8 hours ago

Truly stunning that they omitted this information.

colesantiago

10 hours ago

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

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

j16sdiz

8 hours ago

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

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

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

0xDEAFBEAD

7 hours ago

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

ssl-3

7 hours ago

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

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

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

We don't know.

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

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

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

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

AnthonyMouse

7 hours ago

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

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

zorked

2 hours ago

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

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

Two cakes.

smolder

an hour ago

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

0xDEAFBEAD

7 hours ago

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

ssl-3

7 hours ago

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

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

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

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

retsibsi

an hour ago

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

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

0xDEAFBEAD

6 hours ago

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

losteric

7 hours ago

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

Daneel_

21 minutes ago

Then why not just say that in the post?

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

Simple.

zachlatta

41 minutes ago

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

sonicrocketman

10 hours ago

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

motbus3

an hour ago

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

qingcharles

10 hours ago

Just donated. Appreciate the reminder.

abeyer

8 hours ago

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

smolder

an hour ago

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

do_it_for_free

7 hours ago

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

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

account42

5 minutes ago

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

justin66

28 minutes ago

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

aurareturn

6 hours ago

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

- Capable

- Reliable

- Free

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

ndriscoll

2 hours ago

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

justin66

26 minutes ago

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

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

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

> My library is closed at 3am every day!

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

aurareturn

2 hours ago

Ok how about 6am? 7pm?

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

ndriscoll

2 hours ago

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

> someone needs to

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

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

aurareturn

2 hours ago

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

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

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

ndriscoll

2 hours ago

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

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

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

egorfine

5 hours ago

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

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

aurareturn

5 hours ago

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

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

egorfine

32 minutes ago

This is a genuine consideration.

foo42

8 hours ago

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

mr_mitm

7 hours ago

That's a different archive

warpech

7 hours ago

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

mr_mitm

6 hours ago

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

xyst

5 hours ago

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

loeg

5 hours ago

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

spiderfarmer

7 hours ago

They should ask the AI scraping companies for donations.

smolder

an hour ago

They probably have, hence the matching thing.

akudha

9 hours ago

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

crewman9

10 hours ago

Yeah, _no_

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

LastTrain

9 hours ago

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

eru

9 hours ago

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

stonogo

9 hours ago

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

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

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

LastTrain

9 hours ago

They are independent organizations with separate funding.

crewman9

9 hours ago

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

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

tadfisher

8 hours ago

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

GaryBluto

8 hours ago

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

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

stonogo

9 hours ago

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

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

RileyJames

9 hours ago

What should archive.org apologise for in this regard?

TekMol

8 hours ago

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

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

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

neilwilson

8 hours ago

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.

bawolff

3 hours ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

pjc50

4 hours ago

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

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

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

hk__2

4 hours ago

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

spider-mario

5 hours ago

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