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.

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48068333, but got little traction.

That doesn’t exactly instill confidence, honestly…

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am able to.

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.

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.

Indeed. And the one in Admont, Austria: https://stiftadmont.at/en/about-the-abbey-library/

Seems likely, same for me.

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

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."

Uhm... https://blog.archive.org/2026/05/06/internet-archive-switzer...

> No one has cracked this one yet.

There is no better group of hackers/builders to solve this problem, then there are reading this website. There has never there been a better time to do so.

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.

"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.

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