Keep Our Servers Running (blog.archive.org)

505 points by sonicrocketman 7 hours ago

tossandthrow 6 minutes 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 a few seconds 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.

theletterf 4 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 3 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.

w4yai 2 hours ago

You can go to play store subscriptions and cancel there right ?

theletterf 2 hours ago

Not if Google Pay has been used as the transaction agent. It's not a Google Play subscription.

jrflowers 9 minutes ago

John7878781 4 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 :)

theletterf 4 hours ago

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

Melatonic 3 hours ago

eis 2 hours ago

shevy-java 3 hours ago

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

klamann 4 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 3 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 4 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 2 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.

eis 2 hours ago

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

47282847 2 hours ago

zetanor 6 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?

esskay 2 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!

Cider9986 7 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 7 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.

progval 5 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 5 hours ago

radicalcentrist 4 hours ago

RobotToaster 3 hours ago

agile-gift0262 2 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

forestingfisher 5 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 4 hours ago

Cider9986 6 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 15 minutes ago

andai 7 hours ago

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

markasoftware 6 hours ago

qingcharles 7 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 2 hours ago

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

vachina an hour ago

botanical 4 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.

pm90 7 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 : ).

arjie 7 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 6 hours ago

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

anilakar 5 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 7 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?

queenkjuul 6 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

totalconfusion 7 hours ago

Who's paying?

killingtime74 7 hours ago

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

Daneel_ 6 hours ago

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

lukeify 5 hours ago

Truly stunning that they omitted this information.

colesantiago 7 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 5 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 5 hours ago

losteric 5 hours ago

sonicrocketman 7 hours ago

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

qingcharles 7 hours ago

Just donated. Appreciate the reminder.

abeyer 5 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.

do_it_for_free 4 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

aurareturn 3 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?

egorfine 2 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 2 hours ago

foo42 5 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 4 hours ago

That's a different archive

warpech 4 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 3 hours ago

xyst 2 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 2 hours ago

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

spiderfarmer 4 hours ago

They should ask the AI scraping companies for donations.

akudha 7 hours ago

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

crewman9 7 hours ago

Yeah, _no_

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

LastTrain 6 hours ago

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

eru 7 hours ago

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

kalleboo 6 hours ago

stonogo 6 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 6 hours ago

RileyJames 7 hours ago

What should archive.org apologise for in this regard?

TekMol 5 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 5 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.

pjc50 an hour 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 an hour 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 2 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.