Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-loses-org-domain-after-surprise-suspension/

by CTOSian • 7 months ago

674 335 7 months ago

torrentfreak.com

delis-thumbs-7e• 7 months ago

https://annas-archive.se/ Works still

andrepd• 7 months ago

https://open-slum.org/

rockostrich• 7 months ago

Seems like SLUM is down.

regenschutz2• 7 months ago

Why does SLUM say that all the Z-Library links are dead? They work perfectly fine for me?

dmm• 7 months ago

We recommend checking our Wikipedia page for the latest domains.

I wonder how wikipedia feels being used as DNS?

EDIT: Apparently this is a well known practice. Some interesting discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40008383

miroljub5• 7 months ago

Anna Archive is a notable project. Wikipedia displays links to projects. It's not about "being used as DNS" but about providing basic info about the topic, URL being an important part of it.

hirako20005• 7 months ago

But this mechanism is used to circumvent DNS blockade. Wikipedia may be next to moderate if they can force DNS providers and even the org registrar to give in, wikipedia could fold too.

Then pastebin, never ending cat and mouse game.

blell• 7 months ago

Kiwifarms is also a notable web site but they do not show a link to it. This means there is editorialisation going on.

ectospheno• 7 months ago

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_DNS

Can’t imagine they care too much given they themselves also run public dns servers.

turblety• 7 months ago

Seems like great publicity for Anna's Archive. I've heard an increasing amount about Anna's Archive over the last 12 months. It has popped up a lot. I wonder if they've seen their traffic spike a lot.

hirako20005• 7 months ago

I also discovered it via one of the blocking controversies. The attacked is weaponized for discovery. karma at its best.

intheitmines• 7 months ago

see streisand effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

LightBug1• 7 months ago

Agreed. I'd never heard of it. Now I'll be checking it out with a view to supporting it.

AstroNutt• 7 months ago

Definitely. I never knew about it. Now it's bookmarked.

anthk4• 7 months ago

They could always use Yggdrasil.

flipped20• 7 months ago

I have no clue why you're getting downvoted but ygg is a solid option but it would overwhelm the network since AA has intense traffic.

anthk4• 7 months ago

IPFS then. It's just static content, so it has sense to be distributed between nodes. Not under ygg of course.

On the YGG network, I've used streaming without many issues, plus BT. And people have been even gaming over YGG.

Altough they could use YGG for a static address and then just use IPFS for the data but outside of YGG.

Ycros2• 7 months ago

yeah no shit, this is what happens when you agitate the major music record labels - it's going to get worse

xandrius2• 7 months ago

Yep, let's accept the monstrous industries which lock down culture for money.

I for one support their efforts. The same way we store seeds in vaults deep in the depths of the earth, we should do this for digital content too, and without retaliation from any specific industry.

alex1138• 7 months ago

Agree with you and I'd also like to see more abuse by said companies punished

They went after Pirate Bay by literally threatening trade war repercussions with Sweden which is far more destructive than any files downloaded

hirako20005• 7 months ago

What would be better is solve the root problem. These (illegal, somewhat legitimate) hoarding sites are most valuable for research literature which, given the public funding nature of these things should not be gated to begin with.

The comsequence of resolving the symptoms is that illegitimate use piggy back on it. Artistic literature that would legitimately deserve protection get hoarded as well.

Sweating authors of clearly copyrightable arts, typically novels, manuals, are seeing their work accessed free of royalties. For the sake of freely distributing scientific literature.

It makes it impossible to make then distinction given the legitimate utility is operating in a dark domain.

fragmede2• 7 months ago

GitHub did it for source code.

https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/

Ycros2• 7 months ago

Yes, we should archive everything. And we should perhaps reform IP more broadly and re-think how we treat our culture. And we shouldn't expect retaliation.

But retaliation will happen, and I worry that it's going to pull down one of the most incredible archives along with it.

hirako20005• 7 months ago

In that case it would be Elsevier and co.

jsheard• 7 months ago

Anna's Archive recently released a dump of the entire Spotify catalogue so they are very much in the music industries crosshairs as well now.

hermanzegerman4• 7 months ago

They only distribute outdated SciHub Records

RCitronsBroker• 7 months ago

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

xandrius2• 7 months ago

And that's why helping torrenting and seeding the content of AA is vital: they can take down a domain name but not block everyone who seeds.

I said this before but if you've got some spare GB/TB on a computer/server, consider "donating" it for culture preservation purposes:https://annas-archive.se/torre nts

CommanderData• 7 months ago

Looking at mutable torrents recently and it's ability to circumvent censorship via DHT.

I wonder if it could be revived.

The only problem is the mutable torrents standard is in draft and not adopted widely. I think I saw someone proposing using DHT in a way that allows them to host websites. If feasible becomes very difficult to take down.

haunter• 7 months ago

I wish I knew what I was seeding though

And I don't mean the copyrighted part (I don't care about that) but the actual content which might be questionable

IAmBroom3• 7 months ago

You literally download the items you are seeding. Just open them and see for yourself.

hliyan• 7 months ago

Is this an abuse of the ServerHold status? Was this the same mechanism used to delist a Gaza video archive recently?

This status code is set by your domain's Registry Operator. Your domain is not activated in the DNS.
If you provided delegation information (name servers), this status may indicate an issue with your domain that needs resolution. If so, you should contact your registrar to request more information. If your domain does not have any issues, but you need it to resolve in the DNS, you must first contact your registrar in order to provide the necessary delegation information.

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/epp-status-codes-2014-...

ishanjain28• 7 months ago

Yes. Genocide.live is under clientHold status by namecheap and they are trying to transfer it out.

TitaRusell• 7 months ago

The genocide will not be televised!

(A judge in the Netherlands settled the question if there is a genocide going on and since then we've been on Israels naughty list lol)

jeroenhd• 7 months ago

I don't know much about the story or that site, but I can just open it from my end? Whois information also doesn't seem to show any special status.

catlikesshrimp• 7 months ago

They transfered to a new registrar in 2024. Problem solved for now

https://www.whois.com/whois/genocide.live

(btw, that is an excellent website I didn't know about)

MallocVoidstar• 7 months ago

I'm pretty sure serverHold being applied to domains targeted by court orders is normal. It also has all of the xProhibited statuses which ICANN notes are "usually enacted during legal disputes".

koheripbal• 7 months ago

To add a little context, this suspension comes immediately after Anna's Archive publicly implicated themselves in the Spotify scraping "hack" in which they downloaded nearly the entire content library of Spotify and was preparing to release it publicly (~300TB worth) via torrent.

They published a blog post outlining their plans.

pnathan• 7 months ago

Did the operators _want_ to poke the well connected & well funded bear with a historical anger problem?

squigz13• 7 months ago

https://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html

NetMageSCW• 7 months ago

They didn’t come anywhere close to the entire content library, the 300TB represents about 33% of Spotify, though it is close to 100% of the played music.

krick5• 7 months ago

Yeah, obviously I don't know if it is actually related, but my first thought when I couldn't open it today was "Told you so"...

pbiggar• 7 months ago

The Gaza video archive is https://genocide.live, and it was Namecheap that took it down.

https://x.com/receipts_lol/status/2006732606164152651

Zak2• 7 months ago

It looks like it has been restored, and responsibility attributed to a moderator acting hastily due to the extreme nature of the content: https://sunur.substack.com/p/namecheap-stole-the-domain-of-g...

I don't like the idea of registrars doing moderation at all.

NelsonMinar• 7 months ago

The fascist website Stormfront lost their .org in 2017 with some very unclear procedural action, but I don't think it was a ServerHold. It was offline for quite awhile and I think genuinely hurt the site. Although it looks like it's back now?

weslleyskah4• 7 months ago

I think this was genuinely due to the Norwegian Massacre. The guy who did it had an account on stormfront. The whole thing exploded and the owner had to explain that he was not in contact with the mass murderer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks

ComputerGuru• 7 months ago

Full writeup of the Gaza video archive takedown, if you aren't up to date on it: https://neosmart.net/blog/namecheap-com-revokes-domain-hosti...

In that case, it was the registrar (not the TLD owner) that put the domain under clientHold and clientTransferProhibited, etc (which disables DNS lookups).

The Genocide.live site is now back up (just yesterday) after they raised a fuss on social media, and were able to get the domain unlocked to transfer it to Trustname (out of Estonia) as their new registrar.

(The Namecheap founder/CEO Richard Kirkendall surprisingly came across as surprisingly unaware of how anything to do with domain name registries, TLDs, and DNS works on Twitter in an exchange where he thought the entity running the .live gTLD was the archive's new registrar [1], claimed the domain was unlocked for transfer when it was still on clientHold [2], and a raft of other silly mistakes.)

[0] https://neosmart.net/blog/namecheap-com-revokes-domain-hosti...

[1] https://x.com/namecheapceo123/status/2007139737379934559?s=2...

[2] https://x.com/namecheapceo123/status/2007228146060259365?s=2... yet https://x.com/receipts_lol/status/2007984691476156443?s=20

silisili2• 7 months ago

Used to work for a registry. Registries do not just arbitrarily serverHold things they don't like. Even in blatant abuse cases, they'll reach out to the registrar to clientHold it or delete it instead.

I suspect this came from a court order. The only time I remember serverHolding things were from court orders or other legal requests(FBI/DHS/etc). Though the latter would often just ask for the nameservers to be changed instead.

omoikane• 7 months ago

I remember itch.io was put on serverHold by having someone claim there was "fraud and phishing":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42363727

But .org is managed differently from .io, so maybe a more formal legal action was taken.

comex• 7 months ago

Not my experience. My personal .us domain was placed in serverHold in April 2025, after Godaddy Registry sent my registrar an email including the following:

"If we do not receive a response and the abusive content remains active, the referred domain will be suspended (-ServerHold-) twelve (12) hours after this notification, to limit any potential damage."

Yes, only 12 hours' notice. And this was in response to what looked like an automated scan, with a screenshot of a directory listing showing some files with (accurate) modification times in 2011. This would not have passed more than a quite cursory human review. And there is no chance that anyone was using the files, as they were at an unused path (which happened to be exposed via directory listings).

(How do I know that the files haven't been infected without my knowledge? Because I checked, but also because I know why they were flagged as malicious. The files contain an exploit, and will try to exploit your browser if you open them. But the exploit only works on 2011-era iOS! The iOS version numbers are right there in the filenames! The files are not real malware, but part of a jailbreak, JailbreakMe, that installs software of your choice on your phone… if your phone is an iPhone from 2011. I continue to host the jailbreak on purpose, for the sake of a handful of people that still use these devices. I guess you can call it retrocomputing. This particular subset of files was unused though.)

leoh• 7 months ago

Was this the same mechanism used to delist a Gaza video archive recently?

The mechanism used to shut down a website whose videos were fake and that was funded by actual terrorists? I don’t think Anna’s Archive is in the same category, no.

sanskritical10• 7 months ago

I recommend Anna's Archive get a Nostr account. Once they finally have a solid court order to seize domains, generally the rate at which they get seized accelerates greatly. Nostr is the only decentralized manner (no, Mastodon/fediverse is dependent on domain names, which are getting seized by courts in relation to this -- it is not decentralized at all when it comes down to it) that people can reliably use to have a latest content feed distributed.

"Check Wikipedia to evade the court order" just encourages legal action against Wikipedia. Even linking to copyright violations is, under current court precedent, able to bring civil liability upon third parties. It is draconian and our framers would have considered it a clear First Amendment violation, but unfortunately the current jurisprudence says that is the law.

tasuki• 7 months ago

Trying to understand nostr, I looked up its Wikipedia page...

In 2024, in an article reporting on the project's funding, Business Insider claimed to have identified fiatjaf, and had found two websites previously published by this person to disseminate the work of Olavo de Carvalho, a far-right conspiracy theorist.

That... seems extremely irrelevant. If fiatjaf is contributing something useful and significant to the commons, why does it matter that he used to spread far-right conspiracy theories in the past?

As a result of its ability to quickly and discreetly create accounts and publish posts to relays, Nostr can propagate spam much more easily if left unchecked. A notable example includes a case where multiple protocol bridges have been used to conduct spam waves on the Bluesky social network (itself connected to a competing protocol, the AT Protocol) by creating posts on Nostr, bridging the post to ActivityPub and bridging it again to Bluesky.

Surely they also had to create a Bluesky account for that? I don't see how Nostr is to blame here. Perhaps Bluesky forgot to use anti-spam measures when bridging things over from other sources? That's kind of on Bluesky, no?

This reads like a smear campaign against Nostr. I don't think I have the necessary Wikipedia karma to get it amended, but gee do I have opinions on this...

squigz13• 7 months ago

You don't need "karma" to edit Wikipedia.

sanskritical10• 7 months ago

This reads like a smear campaign against Nostr.

It's well known that corporations and governments pay people fulltime to edit Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a whole article detailing the extent of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_o...

Of course, these days the people paid to do this have learned not to do edits from their own corporation or government office's announced IP blocks. But in times passed finding many of this category of edits was as simple as sorting edits on Wikipedia by the originating IP address and looking for which ones came from institutionally announced subnets.

Point being, massive amounts of capital and intelligence resources have been dedicated to censoring social media. There's nanny employees in every single social media company making sure "important" complainers are heard and their desires to silence voices fulfilled. I follow a large number of people on Nostr that have been banned from every other platform. Facebook. Twitter. Bluesky. "Free speech" sites like Gab and ActivityPub servers that advertise "free speech". But Nostr has the same entrance requirements and cryptographic sovereignty that Bitcoin provides. Generate a keypair and you can publish. People that want to find your content can simply subscribe to your public key. This results in a subversion of countless state and corporate capital expenditures. If people use Nostr, they will permanently lose the ability to moderate content in this oppressive manner. They absolutely do not want this to happen.

Nostr can propagate spam much more easily if left unchecked.

Nowhere have I had a worse problem with spam than Twitter and Facebook. For all the alleged vulnerability of Nostr to spam, it has not currently materialized as an issue.

Note that filtering out actual spam without a centralized moderator is one of the most solved problems on the Internet. If you've ever installed Spamassassin or other well subscribed to Bayesian filters on an email server, you know that you never see spam ever again. In actuality, spam is a much bigger problem when you are dependent on fickle human moderation.

xvector• 7 months ago

Definitely a smear campaign, ironically one that seems to be organized by left-leaning individuals on Wikipedia, Business Insider, etc.

Which is bizarre to me because aren't these the people that would want the ability to disseminate information in the face of fascism?

They are attacking their own side (again.) When will idealists learn that this is not the way?

timeon• 7 months ago

That... seems extremely irrelevant.

I find it pretty relevant who is behind what.

monerozcash3• 7 months ago

Once they finally have a solid court order to seize domains, generally the rate at which they get seized accelerates greatly.

Given that most ccTLDs live in different jurisdictions, that's not really a huge problem.

aleph_minus_one3• 7 months ago

Given that most ccTLDs live in different jurisdictions, that's not really a huge problem.

The copyright-industrial complex is internationally very well-connected.

flipped20• 7 months ago

Better have a .onion. It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER, not some for-profit registrar. Onions should be the default, it's secure (you own the keys), decentralized and far better than relying on CAs for encryption.

sanskritical10• 7 months ago

Tor and I2P are great technologies. ZLibrary, for example, runs an excellent Tor hidden service and it is usually the most reliable way to access news from the site. However, this did not remain true for a while when two of the operators were arrested. Tor and I2P require you to have infrastructure online. The point of "check Wikipedia for news" is that you can have something persist even if you do not have your servers online. Nostr is the best technology available in this category.

It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER

This also remains true for Nostr.

But furthermore, as an operator of several Tor hidden services corresponding to public web services. I can assure you that many users, especially those on mobile devices, will stop using your service in large numbers if you direct them to a hidden service. iPhones don't allow background processes without special dispensation from Apple so the Tor/I2P circuit dies every time someone switches between apps. It's also an extreme development challenge, as they don't allow subprocesses either, and then of course your app will have to abide by the GPL at least for I2P (nonstarter for some). "Just ruin your experience for all iOS users and switch to the GPL for all your client code" is not a realistic suggestion. Not that Annas-Archive has a their own client app.

quietsegfault• 7 months ago

I’ll never use Tor because I have no idea what the Tor client is actually doing. Is it enabling someone to use my network connection for cybercrime without my knowledge? No thanks.

xtracto• 7 months ago

Namecoin has had all the DNS issues fixed since 2011. It is one of the few real and useful applications of bitcoin based technology.

Somehow it never got too the attention it deserved.

It was also the first known "altcoin"

superkuh2• 7 months ago

It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER, not some for-profit registrar.

You may own the keys but the non-profit The Tor Project owns the network. And when they decide to shut it down your "ownership" of the domain keys doesn't matter in the slightest. You might think this is a silly scenario but actually it happened in 2021/2022 when the tor project unilaterally decided to kill the entire Torv2 network and all domains were made inoperable. All links between sites, everything that made .onion a web, was lost.

The Tor Project does this whenever they feel that there's a security issue. It will happen again.

As someone that spent 10 years building completely legal community sites on the .onion network with the delusion of ownship it really hurt me. I'm never using .onion again. It is not a place to try to build communities. It is only for people that need 'security' as a highest priority and don't care if everything gets wiped out.

cassepipe• 7 months ago

How are we supposed to discover official .onion adresses though ? Is there some kind of DNS for that ?

supermatt3• 7 months ago

I highly doubt nostr’s suitability as a petabyte DFS/CDN.

sanskritical10• 7 months ago

This is a discussion on whether or not it is better to use it to announce new domain names post-suspension than Wikipedia, not if it can sustain petabytes of data.

dmantis5• 7 months ago

Tor and I2P is a better fit. Nostr is very weird. It sells itself as decentralized, but basically all frontends provide same several relays.

When those relays get subpoenas and remove your resource, you're done. You can use some unknown relays to publish, but who's gonna use them as clients outside of the defaults? It's effectively designed for shadowbans.

sanskritical10• 7 months ago

Many clients automatically seek, or prompt an action in 1 click to retrieve content from additional relays that a Nostr pubkey announces if said content is referenced but not available on already subscribed relays. As a publisher, you announce what relays you are currently publishing to in your identity metadata. So even if you don't specifically subscribe to a smaller relay, you can still access the content on it.

Tor and I2P are great technologies. ZLibrary, for example, runs an excellent Tor hidden service and it is usually the most reliable way to access news from the site. However, this did not remain true for a while when two of the operators were arrested. Tor and I2P require you to have infrastructure online. The point of "check Wikipedia for news" is that you can have something persist even if you do not have your servers online. Nostr is the best technology available in this category.

hypeatei2• 7 months ago

Tor, sure. i2p requires some proxy config in your browser and you need to run a service in the background explicitly. I wish they'd release a dedicated client like Tor does.

FuriouslyAdrift3• 7 months ago

There's always Freenet...

donohoe• 7 months ago

There is nothing stopping anyone here from registering a new shiny .org domain (or any tld) and pointing it to Anna’s Archives name servers.

47282847• 7 months ago

Except they are probably not set up to respond to new domain names and generate HTTPS certificates for them.

pkal• 7 months ago

Some sites like Anna's Archive have .onion site for the Tor network, and others do not. Is there a considerable downside (DDOS?) to providing access to their site by those means?

flipped20• 7 months ago

I have seen Tor network take a hit when there's fight between darknet marketplaces. It's certainly an issue.

m00dy3• 7 months ago

not anymore. Most recent onion sites have enabled proof-of-work mechanism in place, so DDoS attacks are now expensive to carry out.

KingOfCoders• 7 months ago

I remember swapping lists of IP addresses of FTP servers ~1990 when there was no DNS/Domains in Germany working on the internet.

qingcharles• 7 months ago

There was very little DNS in the early days. I just had big notepads full of IPs next to the computer. Especially for the pirate sites.

luckys2• 7 months ago

https://annas-archive.li/ works and there's a few alternatives listed at the bottom of the page

OvbiousError• 7 months ago

Doesn't work where I live, is the block on a country level?

Tepix• 7 months ago

Try using the DNS4EU resolver, see https://www.joindns4.eu/

doublerabbit• 7 months ago

Blocked here too and all alternatives.

luckys2• 7 months ago

I guess so, could also your provider. Have you tried accessing with a vpn?

arowthway• 7 months ago

Excuse my FUD, but are they really non-profit as described in FAQ? I find it a little hard to believe given how aggressive they are at marketing the paid version.

squigz13• 7 months ago

This kind of implies a legitimacy that AA just doesn't have. They're not 'a' non-profit, and there's simply no way to know that they're not taking in loads of money and pocketing it.

chrisjj8• 7 months ago

They're not 'a' non-profit

How do you know?

and there's simply no way to know that they're not taking in loads of money and pocketing it.

Or that they are, right?

jbstack• 7 months ago

As someone who runs a charity, it surprises me how often people equate "non-profit" with "doesn't get paid" or "does everything for free". Non-profits still need money, they just don't use that money to make profit that is paid to shareholders. Instead, they use the money to further the stated objectives of the organisation.

NB: I'm not trying to imply anything about whether Anna's Archive is non-profit or not. Just that the fact that it aggressively tries to raise money isn't a relevant factor.

tokai3• 7 months ago

They provide LLM data sets for 'donations'. They collect other open collections and beg for paid memberships to access pirated material. Its a russian project. You can for sure assume that someone is earning something somewhere.

flexagoon4• 7 months ago

Its a russian project

I've seen people claim this a lot, but is there a single proof that supports this? The only potential insights into AA owners was an arrest of a few people suspected of running the site, and they were Latin American, not Russian.

flexagoon4• 7 months ago

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

WadeGrimridge• 7 months ago

they should've released the spotify dump anonymously

chrisjj8• 7 months ago

That would lose the PR advantage.

gpm2• 7 months ago

Isn't Anna's Archive already run anonymously? So they sort of did...

m00dy3• 7 months ago

so every .org domain is now subject to US law system ?

KomoD2• 7 months ago

Of course they are? PIR is American.

ebcase• 7 months ago

Yes, and they always have been.

reorder96952• 7 months ago

I always wonder why sites like Anna's Archive (and a lot of torrent tracker sites) don't provide .onion addresses. I imagine a significant proportion of their traffic comes from the Tor network, and onion addresses don't have this same weakness that regular DNS addresses have as they're just the key. I can't imagine if they have the servers already up and running, running an .onion address is that much more work considering the resilience it would add and it's existence may even encourage users to access through Tor if they promote it as the primary address.

MarsIronPI7• 7 months ago

If they're going to have .onion and .p2p addresses, they should also add Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil is easier to have always running in the background so I don't have to toggle it on just to access AA.

EDIT: Never mind, I forgot how the Tor software works. I still think also having Yggdrasil would be nice, though.

mmooss9• 7 months ago

How do you access Yggdrasil? .onion addresses require downloading a web browser.

colejohnson66• 7 months ago

Onion/Tor has horrendous latency and throughput. Latency is bearable, but dial-up speeds for downloading can drive one insane.

integralid2• 7 months ago

But you can share torrent links via onion hidden service easily.

adrianN• 7 months ago

It has been a few years since I last used Tor, but even back then you could download at megabit speeds over the network. I would assume that the situation has improved, I’m surprised that you seem to report the opposite.

cakealert• 7 months ago

This wasn't even true 10 years ago...

ThatPlayer• 7 months ago

The speeds are usually bad because exit nodes are more rare. But Onion addresses don't go through an exit, and stay within the Tor network.

xd1936• 7 months ago

Or IPFS/IPNS

https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/ipns/

pegasus2• 7 months ago

Z-Library does, currently it's http://bookszlibb74ugqojhzhg2a63w5i2atv5bqarulgczawnbmsb6s6q...

(as found on https://library-access.sk/#useful_link_tab)

KomoD2• 7 months ago

alternative tlds you can visit: .se .li .pm .in

jimmydoe3• 7 months ago

It might be a sincere effort in the beginning, but at this point, Anna is merely AI company’s foot soldier.

jjkaczor• 7 months ago

Which - now that the various commercial LLM companies have harvested the archive, they will be more than happy to use litigation to raise the drawbridge behind them, so as to block any future competitors from acquiring the same training data...

jimmydoe3• 7 months ago

That would be a very interesting and ironic timeline.

mmooss9• 7 months ago

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

lkbm• 7 months ago

They do have this section about supplying AI data: https://annas-archive.se/llm

I certainly don't consider taking money from AI companies while giving data to everyone else for free makes them AI company footsoldiers, but that offer is presumably what's being alluded to.

jimmydoe3• 7 months ago

Not sure intention but stating the de facto state from my observation.

hashstring• 7 months ago

We love you Anna!

1970-01-01• 7 months ago

I don't understand the premise. .ORG was never a safe-haven TLD in terms of abuse protection. Juicy apple falls from tree, story at 11?

jszymborski2• 7 months ago

thepiratebay.org is still up

toomuchtodo• 7 months ago

They could also potentially write their latest address to the Ethereum blockchain instead, assuming there is a client that could scan and resolve. This would be bulletproof.

Nation-state hackers deliver malware from "bulletproof" blockchains - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45860258 - November 2025

jszymborski2• 7 months ago

They really ought to get an .onion site up.

goku123• 7 months ago

Well! Not really a surprise, is it? We knew that DNS censorship was coming sooner or later. The real surprise is that it lasted so long. X509 (TLS) PKI is also probably being abused right now. We know how differently the administration sees services like these that are actually beneficial to humanity. Choosing to rely on services like DNS and PKI exclusively for the function they provide is a very bad idea going forward for us normies.

We should have considered these centralized and corporate driven core infrastructure components as interim measures while more independent alternatives were being developed. We have a few different alternatives right now. Can't we just choose one and switch over? (something not based on blockchains.) Something like GNU Name System, may be?

PS: They will probably block the IP if Server hold/DNS block is not useful anymore. That's a different problem though.

flipped20• 7 months ago

Tor and monero will save the world.

OsrsNeedsf2P• 7 months ago

Tor yes. I even recall seeing a rare use of blockchain for domain names (Namecoin) over a decade ago. But I don't see how Monero helps?

tavavex3• 7 months ago

I wonder if in the interim period between DNS blocks and full IP bans, some websites will start distributing their IP addresses directly as the "official" way to connect to them.

rurban• 7 months ago

Just add the censored IP's to your /etc/hosts file, and don't care.

goku123• 7 months ago

The question is, how will you obtain that IP address from them? DNS was the answer to that question. So when you ask that question again, you're effectively asking for a DNS alternative.

cramcgrab• 7 months ago

Don’t copy that floppy!

jacquesm3• 7 months ago

Piracy is killing music.

aleph_minus_one3• 7 months ago

You wouldn't download a car.

(I mean: You wouldn't steal a car. :-) ).

hamdingers4• 7 months ago

Streaming is killing music piracy. The scene is a shell of its former self.

mastermedo• 7 months ago

I still remember the hiatus around the pirate bay . org going down back in the day. They updated the landing page on the alternative domains to include a hydra above the pirate ship where above each hydra head there was a domain name[1]. I thought that was a great comeback by the maintainers.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/the-pirate-bay-has-a-new-log...

jacquesm3• 7 months ago

Those guys should get a prize for resilience alone, they put many government run services to shame. The only thing all this legal stuff seems to have done is to harden them even further.

ddingus5• 7 months ago

Such great moves!

On their way down, the original creators made sure The Pirate Bay would continue to be that gift that keeps on giving.

lr1970• 7 months ago

<sarcasm> I thought that Anthropic and OpenAI created precedents that legitimize libgen and Anna archive. They pillaged all the books and scientific papers from those archives and got away with it. Why not the rest of us? </sarcasm>

carlosjobim4• 7 months ago

got away with it

Anthropic paid a settlement of $1 500 000 000 to authors.

wswope4• 7 months ago

Doesn't really mean much until individuals can also sacrifice a small percentage of their ARR to completely ignore IP law.

I'd take that deal, but until it becomes and option, we have a clearly broken system. Rules for thee; not for me, etc.

dehrmann• 7 months ago

Be careful not to confuse using the material and distributing it. There are open legal cases sorting out what fair use means for generative AI. Distribution (seeding in the case of torrents) of this material isn't legal. It got Meta in trouble, and it's getting Anna's archive in trouble.

jacquesm3• 7 months ago

If anything this is a very strong argument for a completely decentralized domain name system.

The DNS is much too fragile in light of all of the recent developments.

ur-whale2• 7 months ago

If anything this is a very strong argument for a completely decentralized domain name system.

As you probably know, this is a very old idea, dating back almost from the birth of bitcoin [1] [2].

Real shame it didn't take off.

[1] https://www.namecoin.org/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin

oybng• 7 months ago

knowledge for me but not for thee

ur-whale2• 7 months ago

Funny how HN is usually ripe with folks crawling out of the woodwork to defend IP ownership as a fundamentally important principle, both on moral and economic grounds.

Yet, as of 08:37:36 MST Monday, 5 January 2026 there isn't a single comment on this thread complaining about Anna's IP theft.

Don't get me wrong, that makes me VERY happy, I am a firm believer that the very notion of IP ownership needs to die a horrible death, something that AI may very well make happen in short order, yay.

But still, I can't help but wonder why the "this is IP theft" crowd is completely silent when it comes to the like of pirate bay and Anna.

acoustics• 7 months ago

I am a firm believer that the very notion of IP ownership needs to die a horrible death, something that AI may very well make happen in short order, yay.

The leading AI labs are not killing IP. They are taking IP and reshaping/combining it to produce their own highly lucrative proprietary IP package which they sell to you.

The mirror image of IP defenders are AI boosters who argue against IP when it comes to slurping up media but squirm when you say "ok, then publish all of the inputs that go into making your frontier models, and publish the model weights too."

tavavex3• 7 months ago

the very notion of IP ownership needs to die a horrible death, something that AI may very well make happen in short order, yay

I agree with the disdain for IP, especially with what it had grown to become nowadays. But while I was also initially optimistic that AI companies may find a way to make IP go away as a byproduct of their activities, now it seems more like the big businesses will cut deals with one another and leave us commoners with nothing. Entertainment megacorps and AI companies rule the world, and I have no doubts that they'd find a way to become close allies. The AI companies get their near-endless stream of training data, the entertainment industry gets a cut of that juicy AI money and gives away their data willingly, while the IP remains locked away from ordinary people for eons more, just the way they like it. No one but us wants IP reform, or at least no one with real power, so it will probably never happen.

squigz13• 7 months ago

Possibly because context matters to many people.

AA is not stealing every byte of data they can get in order to make billions of dollars, collect personal data about people, and then sell that for even more money.

amatecha• 7 months ago

This happened a couple days ago, not "a few hours ago". I was surprised torrentfreak hadn't posted about it at the time -- maybe took them a while to notice? I tried to hit the site on Jan 2nd, 10:40pm pacific timezone, and the domain was inaccessible then.

squigz13• 7 months ago

You could consider emailing them if you notice things first in the future

https://torrentfreak.com/contact/

dangus• 7 months ago

Surprise to who exactly? Anna’s Archive has been one of the most blatant piracy outlets to come around since the days of Napster.

IAmBroom3• 7 months ago

That seems a tad judgmental.

Anna is welcome here on the Group W bench.

fathertimex8• 7 months ago

What is the recommended way to use or download/mirror Anna’s Archive now?

1vuio0pswjnm7• 7 months ago

This is presumably due to the action brought by OCLC against the defendant for "scraping" worldcat.org in 2022-2023

According to the certificate of service, Tucows, the registrar for the .org domain, has been made aware of the litigation

The Court has stated that "browserwrap" agreements, e.g., OCLC terms and conditions, may be unenforceable in Ohio and it's unclear whether "scraping" violates Ohio tort law. It has certified these questions to the Ohio Supreme Court, but unless the defendant responds, it looks like a default judgment will be granted

https://dn721602.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.ohsd.28...

Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

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