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.
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?).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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).
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
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 : ).
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.
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.
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
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?
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.)
"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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#2026_attack_on_G...
I don't think we should be supporting this random guy, no.
to DDOS one website, which is doxxing the owner. Not that it makes it good idea, but it's a little more understandable.
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.
archive.today
archive.fo
archive.is
archive.li
archive.md
archive.ph
archive.vn
archiveiya74codqgiixo33q62qlrqtkgmcitqx5u2oeqnmn5bpcbiyd.onion
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).
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
Stop hiding public data and I might reconsider.
I've never actually got a 429 using a browser though personally, they do throttle aggressively though
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?
Everyone wants to scrape and extract from them 100% for free.
The donation got 3x, sure somebody is paying, right?
I was planning to donate, and this omission stopped me.
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.)
Shut ClimateGPT down, apologize and then we can talk about donation.
https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/11721950124572...
https://erasmus.ai/?p=875
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.