Keep Our Servers Running (blog.archive.org)

479 pointsby sonicrocketman7 hours ago100 comments

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.

John7878781 3 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 3 hours ago

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

Melatonic 3 hours ago

You often still can actually. Call your bank

theletterf 3 hours ago

Just did. Not possible in Spain.

embedding-shape 2 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 2 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 an hour ago

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

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.

shevy-java 3 hours ago

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

w4yai 2 hours ago

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

theletterf an hour ago

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

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?).

ThePowerOfFuet 3 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/

eis 2 hours ago

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

47282847 an hour 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.

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.

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.

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!

zetanor 5 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?

Cider9986 6 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...

qingcharles 6 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

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

LeoPanthera 6 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.

andai 6 hours ago

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

markasoftware 6 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 5 hours ago

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

Cider9986 5 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 5 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 2 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 an hour ago

Do you have an example of such cases happening?

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.

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 4 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 3 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.

SXX 3 hours ago

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

dakolli 3 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 an hour ago

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

radicalcentrist 3 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 2 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 4 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

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 4 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.

vachina an hour ago

Please provide example of such cases?

Hamuko 34 minutes ago

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...

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

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 6 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 6 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.

eru 6 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 5 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

thechairman12 6 hours ago

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

anilakar 4 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.

totalconfusion 6 hours ago

Who's paying?

killingtime74 6 hours ago

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

Daneel_ 5 hours ago

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

colesantiago 6 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.

losteric 4 hours ago

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

0xDEAFBEAD 4 hours ago

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

ssl-3 4 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.)

0xDEAFBEAD 4 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 3 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.)

0xDEAFBEAD 3 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.

AnthonyMouse 3 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?

ssl-3 2 hours ago

Not necessarily, no.

Evil has no boundaries.

0xDEAFBEAD 2 hours ago

"Evil has no boundaries."

Pseudo-profound statements on my HN?

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WDFXJZabt5s

lukeify 4 hours ago

Truly stunning that they omitted this information.

sonicrocketman 7 hours ago

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

qingcharles 6 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 2 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

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.

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 3 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

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 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 6 hours ago

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

crewman9 6 hours ago

Yeah, _no_

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

eru 6 hours ago

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

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

They are independent organizations with separate funding.

stonogo 6 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.

crewman9 6 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 5 hours ago

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

GaryBluto 5 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.

kalleboo 6 hours ago

They're probably reacting to this

https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/11721950124572...

https://erasmus.ai/?p=875

RileyJames 6 hours ago

What should archive.org apologise for in this regard?

LastTrain 6 hours ago

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

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 4 hours ago

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.

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.

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.