theletterfan hour 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.
John787878121 minutes 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 :)
theletterf9 minutes ago
Well, you can't if you paid using a debit card, like I did. Silly me.
klamannan hour 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?).
ThePowerOfFuet4 minutes 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/
pm903 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 : ).
arjie3 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.
anilakaran hour 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.
thechairman123 hours ago
They posted on X about supporting this when someone was spamming them with requests
eru3 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?
queenkjuul2 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
Cider99863 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
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...
botanical43 minutes 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.
LeoPanthera3 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.
progval2 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.
radicalcentrist15 minutes 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.
bulderan hour 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.
dakolli23 minutes 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.
forestingfisheran hour ago
If it works, it works. Also the Internet Archive also excludes many sites for ideological reasons which is the opposite of preservation
Hamukoan hour 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.
forestingfisheran hour 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.
Cider99863 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.
hnfongan hour ago
It's crazy how little it takes to bribe people into astroturfing for you by offering free stuff that costs pennies.
[deleted]25 minutes agocollapsed
andai3 hours ago
Well then another guy should provide a technically equivalent and morally superior service ;)
markasoftware3 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...)
plorg2 hours ago
Are any of those not run by the archive.today guy? That site has like a dozen aliases.
Cider99862 hours ago
Wikipedia links these as the mirrors.
archive.today
archive.fo
archive.is
archive.li
archive.md
archive.ph
archive.vn
archiveiya74codqgiixo33q62qlrqtkgmcitqx5u2oeqnmn5bpcbiyd.onion
topato2 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).
qingcharles3 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.
sonicrocketmanop4 hours ago
Just posting this so others can be reminded to donate the archive (no association by me, just a fan).
totalconfusion3 hours ago
Who's paying?
killingtime743 hours ago
I click through to a few links and cannot find who is doing the matching
Daneel_2 hours ago
That’s what I want to know before committing too.
lukeifyan hour ago
Truly stunning that they omitted this information.
[deleted]3 hours agocollapsed
colesantiago3 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.
j16sdiz2 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.
0xDEAFBEADan hour ago
Why are you guys getting worked up over this? What's wrong with donors wanting to be anonymous?
ssl-343 minutes 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.)
AnthonyMouse24 minutes 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?
0xDEAFBEAD36 minutes 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-317 minutes 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.)
losterican hour ago
why?? It's extremely common for nonprofits to have anonymous matching donors. Even my local animal shelter.
do_it_for_free43 minutes 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
zetanor2 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?
abeyer2 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.
qingcharles3 hours ago
Just donated. Appreciate the reminder.
spiderfarmeran hour ago
They should ask the AI scraping companies for donations.
foo422 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_mitm28 minutes ago
That's a different archive
warpech19 minutes ago
Umm, no? The parent means Wayback Machine, which is a service of Internet Archive (both at archive.org). Or am I confused?
akudha3 hours ago
How do they handle AI slop? If they index AI generated articles, it is just not sustainable, right?
[deleted]3 hours agocollapsed
crewman93 hours ago
Yeah, _no_
Shut ClimateGPT down, apologize and then we can talk about donation.
LastTrain3 hours ago
That is Internet Archive Europe, which is independent from Internet Archive
eru3 hours ago
Interesting. How is ClimateGPT linked to archive.org, and why do you object to it?
kalleboo3 hours ago
They're probably reacting to this
https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/11721950124572...
stonogo3 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.
LastTrain3 hours ago
They are independent organizations with separate funding.
crewman92 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
tadfisher2 hours ago
It's not funny at all, it's deeply alarming. I'm in the wrong bar.
GaryBluto2 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.
stonogo3 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.
RileyJames3 hours ago
What should archive.org apologise for in this regard?
TekMol2 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.
neilwilsonan hour 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.