> 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-...
They published a blog post outlining their plans.
I suspect this came from a court order. The only time I remember serverHolding things were from court orders or other legal requests(FBI/DHS/etc). Though the latter would often just ask for the nameservers to be changed instead.
"If we do not receive a response and the abusive content remains active, the referred domain will be suspended (-ServerHold-) twelve (12) hours after this notification, to limit any potential damage."
Yes, only 12 hours' notice. And this was in response to what looked like an automated scan, with a screenshot of a directory listing showing some files with (accurate) modification times in 2011. This would not have passed more than a quite cursory human review. And there is no chance that anyone was using the files, as they were at an unused path (which happened to be exposed via directory listings).
(How do I know that the files haven't been infected without my knowledge? Because I checked, but also because I know why they were flagged as malicious. The files contain an exploit, and will try to exploit your browser if you open them. But the exploit only works on 2011-era iOS! The iOS version numbers are right there in the filenames! The files are not real malware, but part of a jailbreak, JailbreakMe, that installs software of your choice on your phone… if your phone is an iPhone from 2011. I continue to host the jailbreak on purpose, for the sake of a handful of people that still use these devices. I guess you can call it retrocomputing. This particular subset of files was unused though.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42363727
But .org is managed differently from .io, so maybe a more formal legal action was taken.
In that case, it was the registrar (not the TLD owner) that put the domain under clientHold and clientTransferProhibited, etc (which disables DNS lookups).
The Genocide.live site is now back up (just yesterday) after they raised a fuss on social media, and were able to get the domain unlocked to transfer it to Trustname (out of Estonia) as their new registrar.
(The Namecheap founder/CEO Richard Kirkendall surprisingly came across as surprisingly unaware of how anything to do with domain name registries, TLDs, and DNS works on Twitter in an exchange where he thought the entity running the .live gTLD was the archive's new registrar [1], claimed the domain was unlocked for transfer when it was still on clientHold [2], and a raft of other silly mistakes.)
[0]: https://neosmart.net/blog/namecheap-com-revokes-domain-hosti...
[1]: https://x.com/namecheapceo123/status/2007139737379934559?s=2...
[2]: https://x.com/namecheapceo123/status/2007228146060259365?s=2... yet https://x.com/receipts_lol/status/2007984691476156443?s=20
I don't like the idea of registrars doing moderation at all.
(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)
The mechanism used to shut down a website whose videos were fake and that was funded by actual terrorists? I don’t think Anna’s Archive is in the same category, no.
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.
Can’t imagine they care too much given they themselves also run public dns servers.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-pirate-bay-has-a-new-log...
On their way down, the original creators made sure The Pirate Bay would continue to be that gift that keeps on giving.
We should have considered these centralized and corporate driven core infrastructure components as interim measures while more independent alternatives were being developed. We have a few different alternatives right now. Can't we just choose one and switch over? (something not based on blockchains.) Something like GNU Name System, may be?
PS: They will probably block the IP if Server hold/DNS block is not useful anymore. That's a different problem though.
(as found on https://library-access.sk/#useful_link_tab)
EDIT: Never mind, I forgot how the Tor software works. I still think also having Yggdrasil would be nice, though.
"Check Wikipedia to evade the court order" just encourages legal action against Wikipedia. Even linking to copyright violations is, under current court precedent, able to bring civil liability upon third parties. It is draconian and our framers would have considered it a clear First Amendment violation, but unfortunately the current jurisprudence says that is the law.
When those relays get subpoenas and remove your resource, you're done. You can use some unknown relays to publish, but who's gonna use them as clients outside of the defaults? It's effectively designed for shadowbans.
Tor and I2P are great technologies. ZLibrary, for example, runs an excellent Tor hidden service and it is usually the most reliable way to access news from the site. However, this did not remain true for a while when two of the operators were arrested. Tor and I2P require you to have infrastructure online. The point of "check Wikipedia for news" is that you can have something persist even if you do not have your servers online. Nostr is the best technology available in this category.
> It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER
This also remains true for Nostr.
But furthermore, as an operator of several Tor hidden services corresponding to public web services. I can assure you that many users, especially those on mobile devices, will stop using your service in large numbers if you direct them to a hidden service. iPhones don't allow background processes without special dispensation from Apple so the Tor/I2P circuit dies every time someone switches between apps. It's also an extreme development challenge, as they don't allow subprocesses either, and then of course your app will have to abide by the GPL at least for I2P (nonstarter for some). "Just ruin your experience for all iOS users and switch to the GPL for all your client code" is not a realistic suggestion. Not that Annas-Archive has a their own client app.
Somehow it never got too the attention it deserved.
It was also the first known "altcoin"
You may own the keys but the non-profit The Tor Project owns the network. And when they decide to shut it down your "ownership" of the domain keys doesn't matter in the slightest. You might think this is a silly scenario but actually it happened in 2021/2022 when the tor project unilaterally decided to kill the entire Torv2 network and all domains were made inoperable. All links between sites, everything that made .onion a web, was lost.
The Tor Project does this whenever they feel that there's a security issue. It will happen again.
As someone that spent 10 years building completely legal community sites on the .onion network with the delusion of ownship it really hurt me. I'm never using .onion again. It is not a place to try to build communities. It is only for people that need 'security' as a highest priority and don't care if everything gets wiped out.
Given that most ccTLDs live in different jurisdictions, that's not really a huge problem.
The copyright-industrial complex is internationally very well-connected.
> In 2024, in an article reporting on the project's funding, Business Insider claimed to have identified fiatjaf, and had found two websites previously published by this person to disseminate the work of Olavo de Carvalho, a far-right conspiracy theorist.
That... seems extremely irrelevant. If fiatjaf is contributing something useful and significant to the commons, why does it matter that he used to spread far-right conspiracy theories in the past?
> As a result of its ability to quickly and discreetly create accounts and publish posts to relays, Nostr can propagate spam much more easily if left unchecked. A notable example includes a case where multiple protocol bridges have been used to conduct spam waves on the Bluesky social network (itself connected to a competing protocol, the AT Protocol) by creating posts on Nostr, bridging the post to ActivityPub and bridging it again to Bluesky.
Surely they also had to create a Bluesky account for that? I don't see how Nostr is to blame here. Perhaps Bluesky forgot to use anti-spam measures when bridging things over from other sources? That's kind of on Bluesky, no?
This reads like a smear campaign against Nostr. I don't think I have the necessary Wikipedia karma to get it amended, but gee do I have opinions on this...
It's well known that corporations and governments pay people fulltime to edit Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a whole article detailing the extent of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_o...
Of course, these days the people paid to do this have learned not to do edits from their own corporation or government office's announced IP blocks. But in times passed finding many of this category of edits was as simple as sorting edits on Wikipedia by the originating IP address and looking for which ones came from institutionally announced subnets.
Point being, massive amounts of capital and intelligence resources have been dedicated to censoring social media. There's nanny employees in every single social media company making sure "important" complainers are heard and their desires to silence voices fulfilled. I follow a large number of people on Nostr that have been banned from every other platform. Facebook. Twitter. Bluesky. "Free speech" sites like Gab and ActivityPub servers that advertise "free speech". But Nostr has the same entrance requirements and cryptographic sovereignty that Bitcoin provides. Generate a keypair and you can publish. People that want to find your content can simply subscribe to your public key. This results in a subversion of countless state and corporate capital expenditures. If people use Nostr, they will permanently lose the ability to moderate content in this oppressive manner. They absolutely do not want this to happen.
> Nostr can propagate spam much more easily if left unchecked.
Nowhere have I had a worse problem with spam than Twitter and Facebook. For all the alleged vulnerability of Nostr to spam, it has not currently materialized as an issue.
Note that filtering out actual spam without a centralized moderator is one of the most solved problems on the Internet. If you've ever installed Spamassassin or other well subscribed to Bayesian filters on an email server, you know that you never see spam ever again. In actuality, spam is a much bigger problem when you are dependent on fickle human moderation.
I find it pretty relevant who is behind what.
Which is bizarre to me because aren't these the people that would want the ability to disseminate information in the face of fascism?
They are attacking their own side (again.) When will idealists learn that this is not the way?
Nation-state hackers deliver malware from "bulletproof" blockchains - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45860258 - November 2025
According to the certificate of service, Tucows, the registrar for the .org domain, has been made aware of the litigation
The Court has stated that "browserwrap" agreements, e.g., OCLC terms and conditions, may be unenforceable in Ohio and it's unclear whether "scraping" violates Ohio tort law. It has certified these questions to the Ohio Supreme Court, but unless the defendant responds, it looks like a default judgment will be granted
https://dn721602.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.ohsd.28...
https://dn721602.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.ohsd.28...
Anthropic paid a settlement of $1 500 000 000 to authors.
I'd take that deal, but until it becomes and option, we have a clearly broken system. Rules for thee; not for me, etc.
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.
Yet, as of 08:37:36 MST Monday, 5 January 2026 there isn't a single comment on this thread complaining about Anna's IP theft.
Don't get me wrong, that makes me VERY happy, I am a firm believer that the very notion of IP ownership needs to die a horrible death, something that AI may very well make happen in short order, yay.
But still, I can't help but wonder why the "this is IP theft" crowd is completely silent when it comes to the like of pirate bay and Anna.
I agree with the disdain for IP, especially with what it had grown to become nowadays. But while I was also initially optimistic that AI companies may find a way to make IP go away as a byproduct of their activities, now it seems more like the big businesses will cut deals with one another and leave us commoners with nothing. Entertainment megacorps and AI companies rule the world, and I have no doubts that they'd find a way to become close allies. The AI companies get their near-endless stream of training data, the entertainment industry gets a cut of that juicy AI money and gives away their data willingly, while the IP remains locked away from ordinary people for eons more, just the way they like it. No one but us wants IP reform, or at least no one with real power, so it will probably never happen.
The leading AI labs are not killing IP. They are taking IP and reshaping/combining it to produce their own highly lucrative proprietary IP package which they sell to you.
The mirror image of IP defenders are AI boosters who argue against IP when it comes to slurping up media but squirm when you say "ok, then publish all of the inputs that go into making your frontier models, and publish the model weights too."
AA is not stealing every byte of data they can get in order to make billions of dollars, collect personal data about people, and then sell that for even more money.
The DNS is much too fragile in light of all of the recent developments.
As you probably know, this is a very old idea, dating back almost from the birth of bitcoin [1] [2].
Real shame it didn't take off.
[1] https://www.namecoin.org/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin
(I mean: You wouldn't steal a car. :-) ).
On the YGG network, I've used streaming without many issues, plus BT. And people have been even gaming over YGG.
Altough they could use YGG for a static address and then just use IPFS for the data but outside of YGG.
Anna is welcome here on the Group W bench.
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.
They went after Pirate Bay by literally threatening trade war repercussions with Sweden which is far more destructive than any files downloaded
But retaliation will happen, and I worry that it's going to pull down one of the most incredible archives along with it.
NB: I'm not trying to imply anything about whether Anna's Archive is non-profit or not. Just that the fact that it aggressively tries to raise money isn't a relevant factor.
How do you know?
> and there's simply no way to know that they're not taking in loads of money and pocketing it.
Or that they are, right?
I've seen people claim this a lot, but is there a single proof that supports this? The only potential insights into AA owners was an arrest of a few people suspected of running the site, and they were Latin American, not Russian.
I certainly don't consider taking money from AI companies while giving data to everyone else for free makes them AI company footsoldiers, but that offer is presumably what's being alluded to.
