Technology

61235 readers

6394 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each other!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

597

AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/technology

46 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will "eat just about anything that finds its way inside."

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It's not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an "infinite maze" of static files with no exit links, where they "get stuck" and "thrash around" for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That's likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

if they are stupid and scrape serially. the AI can have one "thread" caught in the tar while other "threads" continues to steal your content.

with a ban they would have to keep track of what banned them to not hit it again and get yet another of their IP range banned.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

Banning IP ranges isn't going to work. A lot of these companies rent out home IP addresses.

Also the point isn't just protecting content, it's data poisoning.

[–] partial_accumen 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

if they are stupid and scrape serially. the AI can have one “thread” caught in the tar while other “threads” continues to steal your content.

Why would it be only one thread stuck in the tarpit? If the tarpit maze has more than one choice (like a forked road) then the AI would have to spawn another thread to follow that path, yes? Then another thread would be spawned at the next fork in the road. Ad infinitum until the AI stops spawning threads or exhausts the resources of the web server (a DOS).

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 day ago

so they will have threads caught in pit and other threads stealing content. not only did you waste time with a tar pit your content still gets stolen.

any scraper worth its salt, especially with LLMs, would have garbage detection of sorts, so poisoning the model is likely not effective. they likely have more resources than you so a few spinning threads is trivial. all the while your server still has to service all these requests for garbage that is likely ineffective wasting that bandwidth you have to pay for, cycles that can be better served actually doing somehthing, and your content STILL gets stolen.