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Keep Our Servers Running

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261–270 of 292 posts

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#261

Post by zetanor »

bee_rider wrote: post #209
zetanor wrote: post #32

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 irrevocabl…

Have they pulled many other “stunts” like the COVID library? It was a pretty crazy time, I think we shouldn’t judge things done then too harshly.

The COVID library wasn't even the first time they had book lending on the Archive. I remember at least a couple of different prior borrowing mechanisms. But besides books, JS/WASM emulators were added a long time ago to run game console ROMs directly in the browser on any collection that happens to contain them. There's probably other examples, but nothing else comes to mind right now.

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#262

Post by mitxela »

Aurornis wrote: post #260
mitxela wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with hosting warez exactly? Or the COVID emergency library? Do you think they're actually bad things to do, or are you just worried about the legal risk? If the latter, you should keep donating until you find someone who's doing the same thing with less risk.

They’re legally indefensible and are an existential threat to the entire organization. The reason many of us donate is for the internet archiving part of the business. When an organization starts taking donations and doing other things with them, including things that actively threaten the existence of the thing you were trying to support, it’s reasonable to stop donating.

Will stopping donating result in more or less archiving?

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#263

Post by eru »

mitxela wrote: post #256
DaSHacka wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL it never ceases to amaze me what people on fringe sides of the internet get worked up over. Actual modern day luddites, it's going to be so hilarious in a couple years from now when they all stop caring about AI and move on to the next 'current thing'.

The Luddites were right about everything btw

Tell me one thing they were right about, please.

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#264

Post by eru »

yreg wrote: post #139
eru wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why sell? I thought the idea of donating to them is to make the information available for everyone for free.

Bandwidth costs money, and one could sell premium access to fund one's more public minded services.

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#265

Post by coryrc »

mitxela wrote: post #262
Aurornis wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re legally indefensible and are an existential threat to the entire organization. The reason many of us donate is for the internet archiving part of the business. When an organization starts taking donations and doing other things with them, including things that actively threaten the existence of the thing you were trying to support, it’s reasonable to stop donating.

Will stopping donating result in more or less archiving?

More, if it causes the organization to change course and avoid being sued into oblivion.

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#266

Post by Aurornis »

mitxela wrote: post #262
Aurornis wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re legally indefensible and are an existential threat to the entire organization. The reason many of us donate is for the internet archiving part of the business. When an organization starts taking donations and doing other things with them, including things that actively threaten the existence of the thing you were trying to support, it’s reasonable to stop donating.

Will stopping donating result in more or less archiving?

When a donation-dependent organization starts losing people over its mission, the board takes notice and adjusts course. Unless they're so far gone that they don't care about taking down the organization to pursue activist side quests, in which case donations don't matter.

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#267

Post by zplizzi »

raybb wrote: post #259
b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, why a BDFL framework like FastAPI over Litestar or a different, performant language altogether?

Not another language because the performance issues are limited to the code being sync. Anyway, a gradual migration was a must as well. This is the first I hear of Litestar and I think it does seem very values aligned. I fastapi was picked simply because it was already known by the team and had a very thriving ecosystem. That being said, the hard part is getting off the old sync web.py stuff. Once everything is in as…

I’ve been using litestar for loads of projects recently and have been loving it. The ability to have full request/response typing (and openapi spec autogeneration) with your favorite dataclass framework is quite nice (I use attrs). I didn’t want to be forced to use pydantic like some other frameworks do.

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#268

Post by ndiddy »

mitxela wrote: post #247
TechSquidTV wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do have that. All archives have torrents.

And half those torrents are missing half their files because the torrent generator races with the upload process and often runs on a half completed upload.

This has been a problem for years at this point and they still haven’t fixed it, it’s frankly bizarre.

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#269

Post by [deleted] »

zetanor wrote: post #32

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 irrevocabl…

[deleted]

Re: Keep Our Servers Running

#270

Post by addy34 »

frenchtoast8 wrote: post #183
zetanor wrote: post #32

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 irrevocabl…

How much did IA spend on legal fees, employee time, etc in their defense of the COVID emergency library that most people thought was a lost cause? I need to know where my donation dollars are going.

Tax filings are available here:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...

        Rev.  Costs(all)  Legal
  -----------------------------
  2019   37       37        0.2   
  2020   22       20        0.4
  2021   30       25        2.0
  2022   31       26        1.8
  2023   24       33        1.0
  2024   27       24        2.2
USD millions. Legal is non-employee costs.
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