It works in the browser

Network effect. It’s been hard enough to get friends and family to move away from Whatsapp, it’s going to be a while till I get them away from telegram as well

Yup. Well, and bulk book downloaders. But mostly the servers, and anyone else trying to set up a shadow library

It’s a decentralized backup, basically. Storage servers get seized and shut down all the time, and then people can rebuild from the torrents. The more people help to seed, the more likely it is that everything survives a takedown.

Yeah, GB and Gb are clearly defined. But the flyer says “gig”

What is actually being offered here? It says ‘2 gig’ in several places, I assume that means 2 Gb/s? No way that’s actually 2 GB/s, right?

I hate imprecise language in advertisements, smh

You’re right, and I’m sorry if I came over as condescending. The thing is, with projects like these, you need to front load a lot of the safety concerns if you are going to be the one actually hosting the content. It’d be an easier entry to contribute to existing structures, staying more low-key and learning along the way. Many established projects are open-source and need programmers and hackers to help improve and secure their codebases, for example.

That said, if you wanted to start something of your own, I think Anna’s blog is a nice starting point, before you delve into the technical nitty-gritty:

https://annas-archive.org/blog/blog-how-to-become-a-pirate-archivist.html

https://annas-archive.org/blog/how-to-run-a-shadow-library.html

Then, for the actual hosting process, much depends on the stack you use. Never pay for anything in a way that can be traced, which basically only leaves cash or anonymous crypto like Monero. Don’t use any account names, emails, passwords, etc that you’ve ever used before. Never, ever go boasting to strangers, or even worse, friends, about what you’re doing. Do all the standard things of hardening your servers, but always plan around some or all of them being shut down it seized. Even “bulletproof hosting” providers get raided every once in a while. That means decentralization, and don’t put convenience over safety.

Now, while shadow libraries and other forms of media piracies certainly are sought-after targets, you’re likely not going to be anyone’s number one priority, while there’s still rings of child abusers and terrorists on the web. But once you reach a certain size, state actors will come after you, like they did after z-lib a while ago. I don’t have any comprehensive guides on Opsec (and I’m no expert on it, by any measure), but most of it boils down to common sense and keeping your mouth shut, anyways. Most people that get busted don’t have missed some technical vulnerability, but because they’ve talked about their illegal projects on accounts linked to their real name, or something similarly trivial.

Becoming a provider (on any significant scale) should be treated like a second job, at least. If you want to go the silent route, you need to completely separate your daily life from the illegal stuff. Obvious stuff, like no shared email- or other accounts, but even down to no shared browser sessions. The old fashioned way is a second laptop. If you want to make an impact and contribute to the community, consider seeding torrents for some of the existing shadow libraries. Anna’s Archive has about a petabyte of torrents that have less than three seeders, for example.

From the responses in this thread, it seems like OP is either a fed, or, much more likely, extremely inexperienced and naive when it comes to Opsec. At the very least, they are putting themselves at risk. Is it still advisable to leave this post up?

The publishers don’t care. They’re suing LibGen, scihub, etc nonetheless. Non-commercialism will not protect you. Crypto can be very traceable, it’s by definition an open ledger, and “bulletproof servers” is a term applied very broadly, often by dubious actors. Besides that, any Opsec is only as strong as the weakest link. You’re running a second domain via Namecheap, for fucks sake! Don’t take this lightly, this is not a game. A state actor could probably identify you within days. Are you ready for that?

that’s not how it works. the code and website may live on, but you are committing a crime right now (nothing wrong with that). If law enforcement comes after you, it won’t matter if you’ve ‘stepped away’ in the mean time. You can either go the route of Anna, keep very tight Opsec and make sure nothing seeps through the cracks. Or you go the way of Alexandra Elbakyan, make your piracy public, to make a point. That means you willingly accept never being able to travel anywhere that has enforced copyright laws. If you half-ass it somewhere in between, you will get caught, and you will face prison time or hefty fines (potentially millions). Are you aware of that?

that’s good and all, but as it stands now, it seems almost guaranteed your PII will leak. Are you okay to never set foot into a country that extradites to the US again?

Fair, at least as long as they’re not open-source

putting aside the obvious glowie talk someone else raised, you should really, really reconsider your opsec. And I mean, really. Using discord to communicate? And spamming Reddit, from a non-dedicated account, no less? Posting PII to justify downtimes? If this gets any traction at all, you’re in deep shit. There’s a good reason Anna is as anonymous as she is. Cat is out of the bag at this point, I’d recommend shutting it down. You could always continue developing the code for it, the frontend looks pretty good. But please, reconsider if you have the dedication and knowledge it takes to run a shadow library and not be caught.

I got a NAS with 24GB, that’s spread around three harddrives, yes. The files are a binary container format, it’s described here. So I could unpack them, but I have no reason to, really. Much easier to get the individual books I want. Each torrent is usually about 250GB, but some of the older ones are much larger or smaller

I got about 10TB of Anna’s permanently seeding o7

Is there a coordinated way to mirror it, like Anna’s Archive is doing with their torrents? I’d be happy to pitch in a few terrabytes

Most numpy array functions already utilize multiple cores, because they’re optimized and written in C