this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
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112
How do websites like Anna's archive hide their hosting infrastructure? (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 1 day ago by Bomnam@discuss.tchncs.de to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
32 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] Natanael@slrpnk.net 62 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] fonix232@fedia.io 39 points 1 day ago (3 children)

They also have all the data in a set of torrent files.

I've actually been working on an AA client + Readarr (yes yes I know the main project is dead, I meant for generally book-related Arr stack projects) provider.

The idea is pretty straightforward:

  • the client connects to the current AA instance and grabs the torrents
  • each torrent is added to a built-in client, with all files set to "don't download" (so at the moment it does nothing beyond peer discovery)
  • each torrent is now versioned and provides a metadata batch of all files and paths included
  • metadata is matched to paths during lookup
  • provider interface allows upstream software (e.g. Readarr, Chaptarr, etc.) to search for a specific release with some extra parameters (language, format, date added, etc.), uses AA approach of hash to path matching
  • path is matched to torrent, within that torrent, that path is set to be downloaded
  • upon download the file path is softlinked to destination provided for download
  • upstream picks up new file and parses it (then it gets passed to CWA, AudioBookShelf, Kavita or whatever other frontend you use)
  • the client also automatically selects 500MB worth of files with low availability. This 500MB is separate from what the user has actually downloaded, and is used to contribute back to the P2P net
[–] DebatableRaccoon@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 day ago

This sounds awesome. I hope to be backgrounding it some day.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 3 points 1 day ago

This seems similar in general outline to Hyphanet, a system for distributed data storage that automatically handles random distribution and distributed searching. Unfortunately I don't think Anna's Archive puts its data on there, but perhaps you could consider having your client bridge to that and use it as an additional backup cache.

[–] UsefulIdiot@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

This is a cool as hell idea. I’m very interested. You have the code/ project up anywhere?

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They do hide the servers though, see other commenter's link - straight from the horse's mouth

[–] Natanael@slrpnk.net 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

A proxy server is used to hide the actual application server. They also run separate servers on tor

[–] Natanael@slrpnk.net 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Most aren't though, they're behind cloudflare

[–] Natanael@slrpnk.net 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Using cloudflare means you're using them as a proxy. Cloudflare can be pressured with court orders

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

Moving the goalposts. When you have a third party proxy on your first party proxy it's definitely hiding

[–] Natanael@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 hours ago

Not moving the goal posts because if the first proxy in the chain goes down then nobody can connect to your server, even if the rest of the servers are all up