Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

At the moment, IA stores everything, and I imagine that most people are picturing a scenario where the decentralized data is in addition to IA's current servers. At least, that's the easiest bootstrapping path.

>What happens when someone storing decentralized data decides to exit?

They exit, and they no longer store decentralized data. At the very least, IA would still have their copy(s), and that data can be spread to other decentralized nodes once it has been determined (through timeouts, etc) that the person has exited.

> Will data be copied to multiple places[...]?

Ideally, yes. It is fairly trivial to determine the reliability of each member (uptime + hash checks), and reliable members (a few nines of uptime and hash matches) can be trusted to store data with fewer copies while unreliable members can store data with more copies. Could also balance that idea with data that's in higher demand, by storing hot data lots of times on less reliable members while storing cold data on more reliable members.

> who pays for the decentralized storage long term? [...] who is going to pay for doubling, tripling or more the storage costs for backups?

This is unanswered for pretty much any decentralized storage project, and is probably the only important question left. There are people who would likely contribute to some degree without a financial incentive, but ideally there would be some sort of reward. This in theory could be a good use for crypto, but I'd be concerned about the possible perverse incentives and the general disdain the average person has for crypto these days. Funding in general could come from donations received by IA, whatever excess they have beyond their operating costs and reserve requirements - likely would be nowhere near enough to make something like this "financially viable" (i.e. profitable) but it might be enough to convince people who were on the fence to chip in few hundred GB and some bandwidth. This is an open question though, and probably the main reason no decentralized storage project has really taken off.

I don't think TPB ever hosted any copyrighted content, even indirectly by its users. Torrent peers do not ever send any file contents through the tracker.

I'm backing ranger_danger here.

In Law the technicalities matter.

Trackers generally do not host any content, just hashcodes and (sometimes) meta data descriptions of content.

If "your" (ie let's say _you_ TZubiri) client is distributing child pornography content because you have a partially downloaded CP file then that's on _you_ and not on the tracker.

The "tracker" has unique hashcode signatures of tens of millions of torrents - it literaly just puts clients (such as the one that you might be running yourself on your machine in the example above) in touch with other clients who are "just asking" about the same unique hashcode signature.

Some tracker affiliated websites (eg: TPB) might host searchable indexes of metadata associated with specific torrents (and still not host the torrents themselves) but "pure" trackers can literally operate with zero knowledge of any content - just arrange handshakes between clients looking for matching hashes - whether that's UbuntuLatest or DonkeyNotKong

It’s all about copyright. Copyright law in the US gives a monopoly on distribution of copies of things (hand‐waving because the definitions are hard, basically artistic works) to their author. Of course authors usually delegate that right to their publisher for practical and financial reasons. There are some fair use exceptions, but this basically makes it illegal for anyone else to make and distribute copies of the author’s work. Again, hand‐waving because I don't want to have to write a dissertation.

When IA shows you what a website looked like in the past, they are reproducing a copyrighted work and distributing it to you. In some cases, perhaps many, this is fair use. IA cannot really know ahead of time which viewers would be exercising their fair use rights and which would not. Instead, IA just makes everything available without trying to guess whether the access would fall under fair use or not. That means that many times, possibly most of the time, IA is technically breaking the law by illegally distributing copies of copyrighted works.

But _owning_ a copy of a copyrighted work is never prohibited by copyright. It doesn’t matter how you got the copy either.

Therefore, pretty much any time someone asks for something to be hidden or removed on copyright grounds, they go ahead and hide it. They don’t bother to delete it though, because copyright doesn’t require them to. If a copyright holder asks for it to be deleted then they are overreaching, and should know that any sane person would object. But as far as I am aware IA doesn’t actually bother to object in writing; they just hide the content and move on.

This means that researchers can visit the archive in person and request permission to see those copies. For example if you are studying the history of artistic techniques in video games using emulated software on IA, you might eventually notice that all the games from one major publisher are missing (except iirc the original Donkey Kong, because they don’t actually own the copyright on that one). You could then journey to the Archive in person to see the missing material and fill in the gaps in your history. Or you could just ignore them entirely out of spite. This is no different than viewing rare books held by any library, or viewing unexhibited artifacts held by a museum, etc

I designed a system where you could say "donate this spare 2 TB of my disk space to the Internet Archive" and the IA would push 2 TB of data to you. This system also has the property that it can be reconstructed if the IA (or whatever provider) goes away.

Unfortunately, when I talked to a few archival teams (including the IA) about whether they'd be interested in using it, I either got no response or a negative one.