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.

  10010110

Suppose you don't have ten hosts that each have 175PB of data but rather a million hosts that each have an average of 1.75TB, and therefore the equivalent of 10 full copies. And then something that periodically checks if there is any given subset of the data with too few copies and makes more.

I don’t have hard data to back this up, but I estimate that plenty of main Usenet binary providers easily exceed that.

Looks like an "organization" tailor made to be awarded EU funds for their "mission".

Somewhere there's a "create a random, soulless, corporate website generator", and these folks used it.

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."

I was excited to see there's a Canadian one, but it's just a Wordpress blog?

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!

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.

You can't register a ch domain with fewer than 3 characters. It's showing as available because that thing that checks available only looks if it's registered, not if it's allowed.

Abbreviated internetarchive.ch ?

I guess I stand corrected, but I maintain it was word salad :)

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.

My comment is a call to arms.

I have neither the technical nor financial abilities to address this problem.

However, as one of the greatest technical collectives of all time, the users of this website might be capable of doing such a thing.

This is likely the greatest challenge of our time.

I really want to reply exhorting you to do the same, so someone else can do the same to me, but this isn’t Reddit…

a dev from ZH would've added a blockchain, mobile app and hosted it on an over-allocated kubernetes cluster. 97% uptime and you need a macbook pro so the website doesn't stutter.

Normally we'd reply with "please don't do regional flamewar on HN" but this sounds so good-humored to me that I've canceled the (no doubt well-intentioned) downvotes instead.

Edit: now someone is going to tell me how mean internecine Swiss conflict actually is...