How do websites like Anna's archive hide their hosting infrastructure? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 12 hours ago by Bomnam@discuss.tchncs.de to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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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 41 points 11 hours ago

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 28 points 11 hours ago

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 5 points 8 hours ago

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

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 2 points 10 hours 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 11 hours ago

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

[-] ryannathans@aussie.zone 1 points 6 hours ago

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

this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026

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