Help the Internet Archive recover from recent data breach

I met Brewster Kahle years before he founded the Internet Archive. His mission to provide "universal access to all knowledge" comes as no surprise. Brewster and his team of volunteers built a DIY supercomputer to crawl the internet and preserve historic web pages on their Wayback Machine. Brewster has since grown his non-profit into a respected digital library of music, photos, videos, out-of-print books, and software.

In September 2024, this altruistic and indispensable public service was attacked by digital vandals. While volunteers and staff clean up this debilitating security breach, their web site is down, and with it, their ability to fundraise.

If you aren't familiar with just how important the Internet Archive is, check out this YouTube video: Why The Internet Archive Matters

The Internet Archive needs your donations, not only to recover from this recent emergency, to keep archiving the internet before you click on a stale Wikipedia reference, and to continue making its collection accessible to the public, but also to defend the organization from the existential threat of corporations who fight hard to ensure that "their" media can be used to turn a profit even when it falls in a legal gray area.

We have all heard of data breaches from the news. What you may not know is just how expensive it is to recover from them even when all data is backed up. For a tiny data center, it can take the equivalent of four full-time employees three months. Now imagine how much it might cost to analyze a break-in and rebuild even a modestly large data center in San Francisco.