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The guy running this site is undoubtedly intelligent but also foolhardy enough to where it’s going to be hard to feel sorry when his door gets broken down. He s
by popcalc 3y ago
The guy running this site is undoubtedly intelligent but also foolhardy enough to where it’s going to be hard to feel sorry when his door gets broken down. He started this project after seeing how dangerous of a situation zlib’s spotlight put them in, yet he tried to replicate their success. He succeeded but I recommend he doesn’t take being a free man for granted.
- sillysaurusx 3y agoOthers will carry the torch. Silk Road was proof of that. Of course, it’s little consolation to Ulbricht, but he deserved to be imprisoned for ordering hits. (Incidentally, I was skeptical of that claim till https://youtu.be/GpMP6Nh3FvU?si=q0KXzP2FNJDin2tW https://youtu.be/GpMP6Nh3FvU?si=q0KXzP2FNJDin2tW.) The benefit of Anna’s Archive is that they have goodwill on their side. They are trying to contribute to academic research directly, whereas libgen seems to prioritize profit (and has to, to survive). Anna’s Archive does that too. The "donations" are actually paying to access features. But by proactively reaching out to the academic community like this, they’ll make a lot of powerful allies. EDIT: on second thought, how does libgen monetize? I thought they ran ads, but I just realized I didn’t verify that. Whoever runs a library like this for altruistic reasons stands to win. The desire to get rich is most of the problem with doing shady things scalably. One can argue that it’s the risk/reward tradeoff, but I suspect as technology makes everything more accessible, an operation like this only costs a few thousand a month. That’s achievable while flying under the radar long enough to hopefully avoid getting in a lot of trouble. Of course, as with death note, everything comes down to: don’t get caught.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago> how does libgen monetize The original LibGen, under anonymous and altruistic founder bookwarrior, did not aim to monetize but was built purely on volunteer effort. Some of the LibGen domains, however, are forks that put up advertisements.
- sillysaurusx 3y agoThat’s so cool.
- qingcharles 3y agoIt's hard to know if they are running it for altruistic reasons or money or both. Probably both. You can make a lot of money. I ran a torrent site in the 00s and it made >$10m in donations.
- caladin 3y agoDid you offer incentives for those donations?
- qingcharles 3y agoYes, "VIP" forums and excluded from having to keep a ratio.
- squigz 3y agoInteresting choice of pronouns to refer to the operator of Anna's Archive
- GaggiX 3y agoIt seems naive to me to think that Anna is one person and not a team of people.
- simonw 3y agoSo "The guy running this site" should be "The people running this site" then.
- GaggiX 3y agoYeah exactly, they were both being naive about it.
- squigz 3y ago"Hi, I’m Anna. I created Anna’s Archive, the world’s largest shadow library. This is my personal blog, in which I and my teammates write about piracy, digital preservation, and more." What do we do now?
- GaggiX 3y agoAs I said, I think you're naive to think that there is actually a member of the Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) team (the team behind Anna's archive) named Anna. They know what is at stake, so they wouldn't risk sharing personal information.
- squigz 3y agoPossibly. It seems at least as naive as thinking a team member sharing an extremely common first name is going to matter in this context.