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Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

torrentfreak.com

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Re: Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

#31

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

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.

Re: Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

#32
post #10

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

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.

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.

Re: Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

#34
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

TPB is still up, 20+ years later, despite plenty of attention from similar groups.

Re: Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DNS is another layer. The URLs shown on Wikipedia will still have to be resolved to IP addresses, which is where DNS comes in. Referring to Wikipedia for the URLs/domains does nothing to circumvent DNS blockades.

It circumvents the purpose of the DNS block which is meant to prevent people from easily finding the site. Anna's Archive can easily register new domain names and put them on Wikipedia, thus allowing people to easily discover the new location of the site.

Of course many sites can serve as "DNS" - Reddit, Github, X, basically anywhere you can put a URL. So DNS blocking is relatively useless.

Re: Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

#37
post #13

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.…

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".

Re: Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension

#39
post #28

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…

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…

> 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.

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