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.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
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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 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
This sounds awesome. I hope to be backgrounding it some day.
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.
This is a cool as hell idea. I’m very interested. You have the code/ project up anywhere?
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
https://annas-archive.gl/blog/how-to-run-a-shadow-library.html
Edit: also on winipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive
Thing worth adding they no longer use cloudflare like it says on their blog they have switched to ddos-guard.
they don't. they rely on having a profound amount of mirrors, both servers and domains. every time they take down one, two more spring up in their place.
A lot of the actual content is ~~hosted and~~ backed 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.
Old Oil mining rigs are known to be used for that. Other than that, as long your IP is sufficiently masked it doesnt matter if your servers are prominent or hidden in a bunker. Noone knows whats inside besides operators.
However, i think they broke TOR's vpn ip masking by analysing traffic patterns on network nodes. So if they really wanna catch you, you are better somewhere they have no way of coming close. Think russia or other countries not too friendly with usa and not giving a flying fuck about copyright. The physical location of servers that is. The admin could sit comfy in the usa.
Also you could have the data encrypted on an AWS bucket but the server decrypting that should be more secure. Not sure how much traffic those sites have but that could ease the strain of on premise infrastructure you have to maintain.
Leaving this comment to come read what people have written, later.
There's the "Bookmark" button for this.
why not just bookmark the thread using Lemmy's built-in feature?
Because people that reply to my comment, generate notifications to remind me to come back, while bookmarks get forgotten for years <3
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