With how many lawsuits they get and the total amounts they now have technically lost in court, how is it possible they still hide their hosting infrastructure? Anna’s archive hosts a truly monumental amount of content and its not like its exactly easy to host petabytes(?) of content in secret easily. Hell the orders for hard drives should make it easy to find them. It’s not like they can just tuck a raspberry pi with an Ethernet connection somewhere and throw up a proxy and call it a day. What kind of techniques are required to hide that amount of infrastructure? Especially under such scrutiny as the US government and many publishers coming for their throats I can’t imagine it’s a small feat.
Nice try, FBI.
And what would the full legal names and date of birth for all the admins be? Asking for a colleague.
Funny enough, the FBI might be hosting some parts now in an effort to “honeypot” the ringleaders.
Tldr all the site data has an offline copy that can be restored from scratch on endless numbers of types of servers.
They don’t really hide most of the servers. They simply put them in places where enforcement is slow. Then when the server goes down it doesn’t point at anyone because it’s simply hired anonymously. And then they hire another server and put the data back up.
They do hide the servers though, see other commenter’s link - straight from the horse’s mouth
Your computer always connects to something using an IP adress which is not hidden. That something can be a proxy or similar to hide another server, but there’s always a visible server.
A proxy server is used to hide the actual application server. They also run separate servers on tor
That proxy server is visible (that’s my whole point) and can be forced to take it down, and very few use Tor or I2P
Most aren’t though, they’re behind cloudflare
Using cloudflare means you’re using them as a proxy. Cloudflare can be pressured with court orders
Moving the goalposts. When you have a third party proxy on your first party proxy it’s definitely hiding
They talk a bit about their hosting infra here: https://web.archive.org/web/20240105093951/https://annas-blog.org/how-to-run-a-shadow-library.html
Interesting read.
A lot of the actual content is
hosted andbacked up by volunteers via torrent. You can grab chunks of any size you want from the site and seed them. I’m doing my part!Edit: took a look at the site and i guess that’s just the backup. Still neat.
Same way your mom does.
Leaving this comment to come read what people have written, later.
It is now later, and I have come to write:
Poop nuts





