• miskOP
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    3 hours ago

    It’s a popular search engine that works with shadow libraries like Sci-Hub or Library Genesis. Shadow libraries are hosts to copies of works of literature and science. Their legal status is murky at best but it’s incredibly impractical to persecute those accessing them.

      • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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        34 minutes ago

        TPB and 1337x are torrents, whereas Anna’s Archive typically uses direct downloads. So it’s more akin to the old CoolROMs back before the massive takedown purges.

        Anna’s Archive does offer torrents, but it’s not for individual files. Their torrents are more like database backups, with thousands of books each. In fact, people will download and seed them to help increase AA’s resilience. Since they aren’t super useful for individual files, very few people use them as such. But clearly, Meta just used them to feed into an LLM, because they didn’t care about the content of the files as long as they were properly written. It was less “looking for your favorite fantasy book” and more “looking to grab every fantasy book ever written.”

        • jaybone@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          Thanks. It’s confusing because everyone is talking about torrents. It’s in the title even, but I didn’t read the article.

          • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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            2 hours ago

            Well i think you can also torrent off of there too. There are massive backup files on their home page that they are basically begging people to download and seed… So maybe it’s that?