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Comment by eh_why_not | Hacker News Reader

I'm told Anna's Archive forces a javascript Cloudflare human-browser check on the visitor.

Given how much data Cloudflare (and other similar giants providing this service) has, this pretty much identifies the person to them.

Any plans to change that to a more privacy-protecting solution?

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We'd welcome a Merge Request on our Gitlab for a Captcha implementation that is as good as Cloudflare but can be done without any external dependencies. If anyone cares enough to make that, we'll merge it!

Your mistrust is not unreasonable. However I think if state actors/rightsholders/CF were serious about monitoring user activity covertly they could just simply volunteer to host a mirror/CDN for Anna. And that would also expsoe paying users.

From what I gather, in some jurisdictions downloading copyrighted material is legal (eg via HTTPS from a website), or at any rate not prosecuted, while uploading (offering to download) it (eg while downloading it via BitTorrent) is illegal (and prosecuted).

Not an expert on laws/jurisdictions; but data is collected, stored forever, and in some places is (legally) on sale. And laws get changed quickly based on lobbying.

Would their plan of keeping the entire archive in torrents alleviate that concern? Like, if a person sourced an index from somewhere privacy-centered, they could directly download from the torrents in whatever private method they wish, right?

I'd expect the number of users from browsers to always be orders of magnitude larger than torrent users.

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