IA needs to do what Usenet has done. Have a bunch of mission-aligned but unrelated orgs (under different ownership and distributed around the world) that peer with each other, distribute all the content obtained by any of the orgs to each other, but that have no technical channel nor capability to distribute DMCA complaints and takedown requests.
This is (AFAIK) basically how Usenet piracy works. You send your warez to one provider, and that provider instantly replicates them to all the providers they peer with, recursively, until they eventually reach the entire network. When any of those providers get a DMCA complaint, they remove the offending files (as they're required to do by law), but they don't inform other providers that they've received a DMCA notice, so those providers keep serving those files. This makes it much harder to remove data from the network than it is to add it.
IMO personal security would only be improved if we diversified away from "the open web".
"Flood the field" with protocols and pre-shared key networks where we have to generate keys together in meat space, make it too expensive to operate the panopticon.
Everyone putting their eggs in the open web basket, gathering in that public commons means all it takes is one bomb on us all, so to speak.
BitTorrent allows untrusted users (read: industry plants) to connect and slurp down direct IP addresses to swarm participants. It's an unanswered legal question whether low-level uploading (such as the percentages one would get as a "leech", connecting to the torrent and then disconnecting immediately after completion) might fall under "fair use" or "fair dealing" statutes in various jurisdictions.
US-centric here: I feel that uploading a small percentage of a file as a condition of downloading the whole thing may very well fall under fair use - most BT traffic is noncommercial, the portion of the covered work uploaded by "leeches" is very small and probably would be covered by the "30-second" rule often quoted in fair use discussions. The only really arguable point is the "effect on the work's value", but then again an average leech is not uploading enough of the work to have that much of a material effect on the work's value.
> Internet Archive Switzerland joins a growing group of mission-aligned organizations, alongside Internet Archive, Internet Archive Canada, and Internet Archive Europe. Together, these independent libraries strengthen a shared vision: building a distributed, resilient digital library for the world.
I was interested in the others, but https://www.internetarchive.eu is a horrible corporate-looking site with a hero image, a boast about AI, a carousel of news that won't scroll with doing its slow scroll animation, a huge "meet the team" section with mugshots and boring profiles, social media links, a newsletter signup form, and nothing to say where the actual archive is.
Reading what little information they have there, they aren't a public facing or public serving organization. They seem to provide their services to institutions only:
"working with dozens of European libraries and government agencies to build web collections, Internet Archive Europe prioritized collaboration with cultural heritage organizations to safeguard our collective history."
"Prisoners obsessed with their chains, more at 11"
What I don't understand is after all why know about Whiteness and Eurocentrism that people would still willingly create and fund projects like this. The public might actually make sense, but B2B/B2G makes none beyond these orgs having the power to prevent others from doing it.
They do exist and involved in archiving. Someone reached out to our amateur radio club and offered to archive any documents we might have. They even asked to archive the video recording of one of our monthly meetings.
That website is really struggling. Very tempting to go to a mirror on archive.org to view it :)
This seems very distinct from Internet Archive in the US, I wonder how separate it is.
Internet Archive Canada (I worked there in 2024) operated like it was a subsidiary, even though I think it was technically an independent organization with some shared directors. Same Slack, same archive.org email domain, etc.
IA.ch has Brewster and Caslon on the board.
I suspect that for the political threats of the current decade the different Internet Archive organisations need to start operating more independently, especially when it comes to funding?
Can you share more about your time at the Canadian one? I feel like there was a big hullabaloo about it years ago, but it's not really clear what they do.
Not sure what hullabaloo -- they do provide a bunch of services to Canadian institutions (including Libraries and Archives Canada) and they perform physical services like book scanning and in the last few years I believe they are the parent organization for the physical Canadian datacentre _somewhere in BC_.
For my work, I worked in their Archiving & Data Services department, on https://archive-it.org/ -- I didn't know this before I joined, but Internet Archive offers various for-pay services to other cultural institutions, mostly around archiving their stuff or white-labelling playback of archives.
On one hand this is neat, as IA have expertise around this, but on the other hand (as a Canadian) I don't like that it's not actually sovereign and that it looks like it's run by our government but that it's not. Tradeoffs, I guess.
> We are a team of change-makers who believe that every helping hand can raise a child and create a better future for them.
Which I found weird. And searching for this phrase yields many site-hits verbatim, which is even weirder. Anyone know what is up with that? Is it some kind of filler text?
Edit: I guess it's from a template, the Contact section is also mumbo-jumbo (address: 123 Fifth Avenue, NY and so on).
Huh. I can’t find the actual... archive. It mentions an AI archive less than 10 sentences in, and has a couple of links, but seems void of any actually archived content.
We’re just constantly in denial that the internet actually does the thing we want it to do.
The internet archive is an excellent demonstration of how to do it.
It’s primarily getting a ragtag group to pool resources and manage them and then gossip with other groups that are doing the same thing.
I’ve spent so much time around the archive that I plainly see a divide between internet people online that can’t connect the dots and internet people in real life that are confused as to why the dots aren’t connecting.
The easiest way to see the dots is to:
1. Stop trying to make money
2. Tally the things that cost money
3. Amortize the upkeep over time
E.g. where do we source resources from, where do we store resources and how do we secure them.
Like HTTP, but for physical materials, not digital.
They've been constantly trying to set up P2P solutions. Torrents, DWEB, IPFS, Filecoin, WebTorrent, YJS, whole bunch of tech acronyms. I'm not sure much of it has really caught on?
> But about time the Internet Archive had a US-independent backup.
Agreed!
> The Internet Archive Switzerland, online at https://internetarchive.ch/, is a newly-formed Swiss non-profit foundation that will operate independently within its national context.
St Gallen has been archiving knowledge for over a thousand years. Now they are archiving AI models before they get retrained out of existence. The location is not a coincidence…
Anything that is being built today, based on the assumptions about the future that extend into multiple years, is bound to fade away. Because the "future no longer what it used be". What's the envisaged future context and purpose where this would save the world?
IA needs to do what Usenet has done. Have a bunch of mission-aligned but unrelated orgs (under different ownership and distributed around the world) that peer with each other, distribute all the content obtained by any of the orgs to each other, but that have no technical channel nor capability to distribute DMCA complaints and takedown requests.
This is (AFAIK) basically how Usenet piracy works. You send your warez to one provider, and that provider instantly replicates them to all the providers they peer with, recursively, until they eventually reach the entire network. When any of those providers get a DMCA complaint, they remove the offending files (as they're required to do by law), but they don't inform other providers that they've received a DMCA notice, so those providers keep serving those files. This makes it much harder to remove data from the network than it is to add it.
So they should use bit torrent.
IMO personal security would only be improved if we diversified away from "the open web".
"Flood the field" with protocols and pre-shared key networks where we have to generate keys together in meat space, make it too expensive to operate the panopticon.
Everyone putting their eggs in the open web basket, gathering in that public commons means all it takes is one bomb on us all, so to speak.
BitTorrent allows untrusted users (read: industry plants) to connect and slurp down direct IP addresses to swarm participants. It's an unanswered legal question whether low-level uploading (such as the percentages one would get as a "leech", connecting to the torrent and then disconnecting immediately after completion) might fall under "fair use" or "fair dealing" statutes in various jurisdictions.
US-centric here: I feel that uploading a small percentage of a file as a condition of downloading the whole thing may very well fall under fair use - most BT traffic is noncommercial, the portion of the covered work uploaded by "leeches" is very small and probably would be covered by the "30-second" rule often quoted in fair use discussions. The only really arguable point is the "effect on the work's value", but then again an average leech is not uploading enough of the work to have that much of a material effect on the work's value.
Torrents in I2P allow fully anonymous data exchange.
Ok private 1:1 wireguard and syncthing or rsync all the way down then
Softlink data to the appropriate mount
The options are endless and tech nerds can 1:1 help friends and family
Locking the knowledge into corporate silos is a huge security risk. The masses should be just as competent and informed so they don't panic
Minority say over the economy and government is just fascism. These people are not deities. They're normal meat and bone
We have processes to replace politicians and workers; we need processes to replace the rich.
Free speech is a circular right and there is no freedom from consequences of speech. They can face consequences too
I like it in theory but the IA hosts over 175PB of data. Wonder how many other producers could replicate that data.
Relevant blog post: https://blog.archive.org/2026/05/06/internet-archive-switzer...
> Internet Archive Switzerland joins a growing group of mission-aligned organizations, alongside Internet Archive, Internet Archive Canada, and Internet Archive Europe. Together, these independent libraries strengthen a shared vision: building a distributed, resilient digital library for the world.
I was interested in the others, but https://www.internetarchive.eu is a horrible corporate-looking site with a hero image, a boast about AI, a carousel of news that won't scroll with doing its slow scroll animation, a huge "meet the team" section with mugshots and boring profiles, social media links, a newsletter signup form, and nothing to say where the actual archive is.
Reading what little information they have there, they aren't a public facing or public serving organization. They seem to provide their services to institutions only:
"working with dozens of European libraries and government agencies to build web collections, Internet Archive Europe prioritized collaboration with cultural heritage organizations to safeguard our collective history."
"Prisoners obsessed with their chains, more at 11"
What I don't understand is after all why know about Whiteness and Eurocentrism that people would still willingly create and fund projects like this. The public might actually make sense, but B2B/B2G makes none beyond these orgs having the power to prevent others from doing it.
Internet Archive runs a completely separate version of their site for paying institutional clients. https://archive-it.org/
In a best case scenario, this eventually becomes the replacement for the (lets be honest) absurdly awful archive.org front and backend.
So: an expansion into the EU market. And yes, a honeypot for grant funds, because why not? Good for them.
Looks like an "organization" tailor made to be awarded EU funds for their "mission".
Mysteries abound.
The .eu branch that card zero criticized seems to be based in Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands (an EU member). Or am I missing something?
I think people are questioning the "Archive" part, not the "Europe" part of the name
I was excited to see there's a Canadian one, but it's just a Wordpress blog?
They do exist and involved in archiving. Someone reached out to our amateur radio club and offered to archive any documents we might have. They even asked to archive the video recording of one of our monthly meetings.
Somewhere there's a "create a random, soulless, corporate website generator", and these folks used it.
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48068333, but got little traction.
Thanks! Since the submitted URL https://internetarchive.ch/ seems to be down, I've put your link at the top and moved the other to the toptext.
That website is really struggling. Very tempting to go to a mirror on archive.org to view it :)
This seems very distinct from Internet Archive in the US, I wonder how separate it is.
Internet Archive Canada (I worked there in 2024) operated like it was a subsidiary, even though I think it was technically an independent organization with some shared directors. Same Slack, same archive.org email domain, etc.
IA.ch has Brewster and Caslon on the board.
I suspect that for the political threats of the current decade the different Internet Archive organisations need to start operating more independently, especially when it comes to funding?
They use Slack? I am kind of surprised. But I am sure on the plus side, that would also mean having to worry about one less uptime.
Slack, Zoom and Google Apps (but not for email) - otherwise basically everything was internally ran.
The Slack has (had?) hundreds of guest accounts due to volunteers and allied organizations. It’s an interesting (and cool) institution!
Can you share more about your time at the Canadian one? I feel like there was a big hullabaloo about it years ago, but it's not really clear what they do.
Not sure what hullabaloo -- they do provide a bunch of services to Canadian institutions (including Libraries and Archives Canada) and they perform physical services like book scanning and in the last few years I believe they are the parent organization for the physical Canadian datacentre _somewhere in BC_.
For my work, I worked in their Archiving & Data Services department, on https://archive-it.org/ -- I didn't know this before I joined, but Internet Archive offers various for-pay services to other cultural institutions, mostly around archiving their stuff or white-labelling playback of archives.
For example https://webarchiveweb.bac-lac.canada.ca/ (the Government of Canada's own Internet Archive) is actually outsourced to ADS within Internet Archive.
On one hand this is neat, as IA have expertise around this, but on the other hand (as a Canadian) I don't like that it's not actually sovereign and that it looks like it's run by our government but that it's not. Tradeoffs, I guess.
The About Us section states:
> We are a team of change-makers who believe that every helping hand can raise a child and create a better future for them.
Which I found weird. And searching for this phrase yields many site-hits verbatim, which is even weirder. Anyone know what is up with that? Is it some kind of filler text?
Edit: I guess it's from a template, the Contact section is also mumbo-jumbo (address: 123 Fifth Avenue, NY and so on).
That doesn’t exactly instill confidence, honestly…
Huh. I can’t find the actual... archive. It mentions an AI archive less than 10 sentences in, and has a couple of links, but seems void of any actually archived content.
Sankt Gallen's more physical archive is worth a visit too: https://www.stiftsbezirk.ch/de/stiftsbibliothek/
Indeed. And the one in Admont, Austria: https://stiftadmont.at/en/about-the-abbey-library/
If you are running that thing, and reading this post: just do the right thing and get your own name.
Uhm... https://blog.archive.org/2026/05/06/internet-archive-switzer...
Ah, good, they are also mirroring the page load speed of the internet archive
I'm so happy about this. Really. I cannot overstate how much important the internet archive is for all of us.
Stop complaining about availability. Instead, create a solution.
If tpb dot org can still exist ...
At least these people tried. We need a p2p archive solution ASAP. Before our history is entirely re-written.
I don’t think the problem lends itself well to decentralization. People have tried to use IPFS et al for this. There were even IA attempts https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-gateway
No one has cracked this one yet.
It has been cracked.
The internet itself is the thing we want.
We’re just constantly in denial that the internet actually does the thing we want it to do.
The internet archive is an excellent demonstration of how to do it.
It’s primarily getting a ragtag group to pool resources and manage them and then gossip with other groups that are doing the same thing.
I’ve spent so much time around the archive that I plainly see a divide between internet people online that can’t connect the dots and internet people in real life that are confused as to why the dots aren’t connecting.
The easiest way to see the dots is to:
1. Stop trying to make money
2. Tally the things that cost money
3. Amortize the upkeep over time
E.g. where do we source resources from, where do we store resources and how do we secure them.
Like HTTP, but for physical materials, not digital.
They've been constantly trying to set up P2P solutions. Torrents, DWEB, IPFS, Filecoin, WebTorrent, YJS, whole bunch of tech acronyms. I'm not sure much of it has really caught on?
https://blog.archive.org/tag/decentralized-web/
https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-transports
Third-party attempt:
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK
Turns out it's hard! Or maybe just too niche. But you can also help them today, by seeding some of collections that are available as torrents.
Oh, good. We need more backups.
The one in Egypt doesn't get updated.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260509154320/https://interneta...
"Its efforts will initially focus on [...] and collecting the generative AI wave that is currently upon us all."
Why would they want to collect the AI wave ?!
But about time the Internet Archive had a US-independent backup.
> But about time the Internet Archive had a US-independent backup.
Agreed!
> The Internet Archive Switzerland, online at https://internetarchive.ch/, is a newly-formed Swiss non-profit foundation that will operate independently within its national context.
I think the Wikipedia Editors will have to decide whether they will add it to the existing page. The Operations section is still listing only U.S. data centers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#Operations
I wonder how long does it take to back it up.
Very proud of my alma mater town to be a place for this. It’s much needed infrastructure for Europe.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260409034921if_/https://intern...
Let's hope they don't use Google captcha and KYC everyone.
Finally a Swiss account I can afford to open.
>> Gen AI ARchive
isn't this a nightmare for privacy
Where's the search bar at the top to search the archive?
Hugged to death? I can’t access the page.
Seems likely, same for me.
Same for me. I cannot access it either.
I am able to.
Have you tried just letting it load? Took maybe more than 30 seconds for the page to load for me, but it did load eventually.
Yep, just loading forever.
They just want everyone coming from archive.org to feel right at home
I am able too
cool!
St Gallen has been archiving knowledge for over a thousand years. Now they are archiving AI models before they get retrained out of existence. The location is not a coincidence…
Anything that is being built today, based on the assumptions about the future that extend into multiple years, is bound to fade away. Because the "future no longer what it used be". What's the envisaged future context and purpose where this would save the world?