Anna's Archive Loses .org Domain After Surprise Suspension
Key topics
The rug's been pulled from under Anna's Archive - a shadow library project - as its .org domain was suddenly suspended, sparking a lively debate about the implications for online freedom and Wikipedia's role in hosting links to such projects. Commenters quickly jumped to share alternative URLs, with some pointing out that Anna's Archive is still accessible via its .se domain, while others questioned why a related project, SLUM, claimed Z-Library links were dead when they seemed to be working just fine. As the discussion unfolded, concerns were raised that Wikipedia might be next to face moderation pressure for listing Anna's Archive URLs, with some arguing that using Wikipedia as a de facto DNS resolver could be seen as circumventing DNS blockades. Despite these worries, others countered that Wikipedia is simply providing basic information and shouldn't be held accountable for linking to other domains.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
26m
Peak period
69
6-12h
Avg / period
17.8
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Jan 5, 2026 at 5:23 AM EST
3d ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Jan 5, 2026 at 5:49 AM EST
26m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
69 comments in 6-12h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Jan 8, 2026 at 7:58 AM EST
14h ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
https://open-slum.pages.dev/
I wonder how wikipedia feels being used as DNS?
EDIT: Apparently this is a well known practice. Some interesting discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40008383
Then pastebin, never ending cat and mouse game.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44379034
Alternatively they pressure USA ISPs to block the addresses. That's already regularly done but it probably won't be enough to satisfy the extortion industrial complex which is out for blood.
sed "/Trump/US-Govt/g"
Why do people here always casually single out Trump? He's not an outlier, it's just how US foreign policy has worked for centuries.
A quick look at the last few administrations is all anyone needs to see how this one interprets the powers and duties that come with the office.
One of my favorite phrases coined during the last Trump administration was something like, "not just wrong, but wrong beyond normal parameters." It basically meant exactly what we are discussing here; namely, being an outlier of some sort.
https://sslip.io/ for instance.
Of course many sites can serve as "DNS" - Reddit, Github, X, basically anywhere you can put a URL. So DNS blocking is relatively useless.
What is illegal in one country can be illegal everywhere.
I don't remember Wikipedia removing LGBTIAQ++ articles just because that's illegal in Iran.
If a government thinks Wikipedia is illegal in their country, they can force local ISP providers to block it, but it's not Wikipedia's responsibility [1] to censor itself.
[1] at least should not be
It's not that they should, they often do though.
If you switch to some other languages, you'll find the links.
For some reason Britannica doesn't have an article for "Anal Creampie" complete with animation. Maybe they're understaffed or their editors forgot to add it.
1. Let's not pretend Wikipedia is something it isn't.
2. Children shouldn't be able to access such content masquerading as "educational" at their fingertips.
I don't see the connection frankly.
PS. English Wikipedia also does not appear to have an "Anal Creampie" article, let alone one with an animation.
Kurt Vonnegut says hello.
Who?
And I still don't see the moral relevance of any of this to choosing not to link to a site that has harassed people into killing themselves.
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/public-policy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarkha
When conservatism has explicitly turned against enlightenment values, the opposite would be anti-conservative. I'm glad someone hasn't given up the fight.
The problem with playing internet police is there is always inherent bias.
Can’t imagine they care too much given they themselves also run public dns servers.
And even after multiple requests of supporting a Tor mode, have routinely ignored that with "but its too hard!"
And, I quit running IPFS back in the .31 version after adding some chat logs to my local machine's share, and found a google crawler within 1 hour and fully indexed them.
No thanks.
And no, I dont my whole internal network enumerable because of 'convenience'.
It takes very little to set up IPFS to just listen to tun0, disable routing (let ygg do its job) and throttle the bw a little so it doesn't hog the whole network.
I would be surprised if the Kubo/IPFS developers didn't already configure Ygg for themselves, as both are software written in Go.
The author of NNCP https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/ (and the other author from Tofuproxy) are pretty much aware of Yggdrasil.
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.
The comsequence of resolving the symptoms is that illegitimate use piggy back on it. Artistic literature that would legitimately deserve protection get hoarded as well.
Sweating authors of clearly copyrightable arts, typically novels, manuals, are seeing their work accessed free of royalties. For the sake of freely distributing scientific literature.
It makes it impossible to make then distinction given the legitimate utility is operating in a dark domain.
But retaliation will happen, and I worry that it's going to pull down one of the most incredible archives along with it.
They went after Pirate Bay by literally threatening trade war repercussions with Sweden which is far more destructive than any files downloaded
https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/
So this effectively re-releases into the public domain a lot of the user contributions during the 1990s.
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
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.
> 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. If your domain does not have any issues, but you need it to resolve in the DNS, you must first contact your registrar in order to provide the necessary delegation information.
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/epp-status-codes-2014-...
(A judge in the Netherlands settled the question if there is a genocide going on and since then we've been on Israels naughty list lol)
https://www.whois.com/whois/genocide.live
(btw, that is an excellent website I didn't know about)
They published a blog post outlining their plans.
More importantly, they may sabotage their mission: If Spotify shuts them down, their exiting archives and especially future archives may be effectively lost.
Perhaps misunderstood something, but according to my understanding
1. Spotify is registered in Luxembourg and has its operational headquarter in Sweden (Stockholm). Both are EU countries.
2. I guess it won't be Spotify that sues, but the individual music labels (very likely united).
But the real servers are hosted in kazachstan or russia I think. And they do not cooperate so much with EU courts.
So unless the EU installs a great firewall like china, they cannot really shut it down.
I believe the "official" AA servers only host the website + source code. The actual copyrighted content is stored by volunteers who seed the torrents.
Meta can admit to soullessly scraping books they don't own for their for-profit AI datasets [1], and it's not a problem because they're Meta. But if you're an artist? Nope. Sampling in hip hop songs, for example, is in a "complex legal gray area" (translation: "it's illegal but we don't want to admit that out loud") [2].
[1] https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-trained-ai-pirated-bo...
[2] https://urbanspook.com/copyright-laws-2025-impact-on-hip-hop...
I occasionally wonder how many enormous collections of culture like that of Marion Stokes[1] have been lost because their curators made no effort to realize the value of their collection.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
The good news is I'd guess the number of (nonreligious/nonproprietary) institutionally managed pointless archives is dwindling.
One may collect/archive now (when the data is, well, "available"), and publish later, when copyright expires and the material will likely be harder to obtain.
And there is a site idea!
Annasopponents.news --> Can inform passersby on anything related to Anna's Archive along with activism related material, how to's and the like.
Realistically, it's just a way for someone to say something is being done about this, even if it's not going to actually make a difference.
1. Generate slop music no _human_ will ever listen to
2. Use a botnet to "play" this music en masse
3. Profit
This is a whole arms race, with companies (such as Beatdapp) specializing in detecting fraudulent plays.
Source: I work for a niche music retailer that struggles with the same issues on a smaller scale.
They identify a huge surge in tracks that few listen to after gen AI started.
The analysis is worth reading. The distribution is (Pareto)^3 ~99% of the tracks played are 1% of the catalogue.
First off, it was striking to me how little of the "top 10 000" they published back on Christmas I recognize. I'm not sure what I expected, but 10 000 sounds like a big number, so it seemed likely to me, that if I get a random song from my playlist I could find it there. It turned out I hardly can find an artist I recognize. Ok, I can recall a song from Lady Gaga and even Billie Eilish, I've heard of Bruno Mars (cannot recall any song), but I have no idea what is "Bad Bunny", "Doechii", "Drake". I mean, I think I do have a pretty good idea what these things are (abstractly), and I probably wouldn't want to listen that. And while I knew that all this stuff is very popular, I didn't quite realize how little place in the top-10000 it leaves for the music I (and everyone I know) actually listen to.
I didn't download the metadata they released (it would be hard to process it on my laptop anyway), but now I wonder how much of my 3 TB music collection is in top 100 000, or heck, even top 1M Spotify, or on Spotify at all.
I also am sometimes surprised how little scrobbles some tracks get. I didn't bother to find out what this means, how many people still scrobble to Last.fm or ListenBrainz, but it is just surprising when I see that a track that I didn't consider to be obscure was scrobbled like 50 times this year.
So I'm saying that music worlds seems to be terribly fragmented, even more than I imagined. So the very premise of AA backing-up 97% of Spotify (by the number of plays) may be much lesser achievement at "preserving culture" than it may sound. And of course we are about 8 years too late to backup everything, since by now half of it must be generative NN bullshit. And I'm not even sure it's in those leftover 3% (bots listen to bot-generated music too, right)?
I've heard of 9 of the top 10 and 15 of the top 20 at https://chartmasters.org/most-monthly-listeners-on-spotify/
You might not listen, but surely you have heard of Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and of course Christmas Staples of Mariah Carey and Wham?
Edit: Ok, I've finally googled "Coldplay". Yeah, definitely heard "Clocks" somewhere.
[0] https://annas-archive.li/blog/spotify/spotify-top-10k-songs-...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qboe5CebixA
Let's reiterate. I am well aware that more people listen to that Bad Rabbit, Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber than they listen to <random name from my playilist>, it's not really a surprise. There even is a special name for people like that, it's "celebrity". In fact, that's probably how most people who are into music (including myself, I might say) would categorize them, as "celebrities", not as "musicians" (though, mind you, of course they are musicians, as everyone who ever sang a song is, it's just that when I hear the word "musician" I don't necessarily think of Taylor Swift). Hence these people indulge themselves for not knowing who these guys are, explaining it that "they are not into celebrities".
And it's no surprise that a lot of people listen to celebrities. I mean, if Trump would release a song right now, it would become #1 on Spotify in no time (for a very short time, but still). Well, maybe not #1, but close.
But I also suppose there are a lot of people who are into music. Maybe not so many, as there are people who are into celebrities, but it's still a lot. And after seeing that top-10 000 I suddenly find it very plausible, that a lot of tracks these people call "massive hits" may turn out to be "virtually unplayed". And hence not in those "97% of Spotify (by # of plays)" that AA archived. I am not even claiming it, I'm just saying that this doesn't seem to be impossible.
For instance, any DnB fan would say that "everyone knows Noisia and Black Sun Empire". It would be absolutely laughable attempt at "preserving human culture" not to include them. Surely all of their tracks must be at least in top-5M, right? Well, after seeing top 10K I'm not so sure anymore.
Maybe you've never heard of them, but surely you've heard of Prodigy. Not a single track from Prodigy on top-10K. Or Chemical Brothers. Or Burial, or Placebo, or Nighwish. These are very famous names in respective circles. There are 2 tracks from Massive Attack — both featured in super-famous movies and trending on TikTok right now. For God's sake, there are only 8 tracks from Madonna in top 10K. Versus 26 from Imagine Dragons and 124 from "Bad Bunny", whatever it is. How do you like Madonna for an obscure artist?
So, my point is that there may be a lot of people listening almost exclusively to "virtually unplayed" music. Entire discographies of (niche) cult-artists may turn out to be buried in these 66% of "virtually unplayed" tracks.
I guess I should just get the metadata and check, but I'm pretty sure that would be outside of capabilities of the hardware I have on hand, so I'm not sure how to go about that.
https://annas-archive.li/torrents/spotify
Anyway, I think you should keep in mind 2 things:
1) 10,000 tracks really is not a lot. It sounds like a lot, but isn't. My own - relatively small - collection is nearly double that.
2) 10,000 tracks... out of 256,000,000 that AA archived.
I'd be very interested to see some more analysis done on this, particularly as it relates to, say, Last.fm statistics - but I suspect the missing music is not as significant as you think.
In any case, even if every one of those "niche" artists you list are missing from this collection, I don't think it's fair to say it's a "laughable attempt" - it's certainly better than nothing, even if it's not perfect.
If they were pre-streaming artists I probably would have heard a lot of their catalog because radio played it over and over. Unfortunately you just can’t get away from the Christmas music.
An while back, another site started with a pile of pirated music, and that was allofmp3.com Remember those peeps?
Their business model was to sell music by selling bandwidth. Basically is was all the music you want charged by the megabit download.
Pop titles were $0.10 to $0.25. A whole album at 256mbps was roughly $3 give or take.
What got me really thinking was how great the UX experience was. At the time, few came close.
The end of that site was packaged up with Russia's entry into the WTO.
I seem to remember hearing about huge torrents out there too. The right infohash can point a person to huge archives of various kinds, books, video, academic papers, music, the WikiLeak insurance files, which is password protected, as perhaps all of these are.
https://x.com/receipts_lol/status/2006732606164152651
Musk has buckled, talking the walk instead.
> that's how I read things on X
So you are not following posted link either.
I don't like the idea of registrars doing moderation at all.
zionist mccarthyism isn't progressive
I generally give NC the benefit of the doubt (because of their principled stance on Ukraine, which to me means they can be principled elsewhere too), but in this case it's very difficult to explain it away.
195 more comments available on Hacker News