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Black Mirror AI

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I check if a user agent has gptbot, and if it does I 302 it to web.sp.am.

Funny that they’re calling them AI haters when they’re specifically poisoning AI that ignores the do not enter sign. FAFO.
- First Albatross, First Out
  
  Fluffy Animal's Fecal Orifice.
- Fair As Fuck Ok?
- Sheesh people, it’s “fuck around and find out”. Probably more appropriate in the leopards eating face context but this works enough.
  
  What are you talking about? FAFO obviously stands for "fill asshole full of". Like FAFO dicks. Or FAFO pennies.
  
  I’m glad you’re here to tell us these things!

AI is the "most aggressive" example of "technologies that are not done 'for us' but 'to us.'"
Well said.

Deployment of Nepenthes and also Anubis (both described as "the nuclear option") are not hate. It's self-defense against pure selfish evil, projects are being sucked dry and some like ScummVM could only freakin' survive thanks to these tools.
Those AI companies and data scrapers/broker companies shall perish, and whoever wrote this headline at arstechnica shall step on Lego each morning for the next 6 months.
- Feels good to be on an instance with Anubis
- one of the united Nations websites deployed Anubis
- Do you have a link to a story of what happened to ScummVM? I love that project and I’d be really upset if it was lost!
  
  Here you go.
- Wait what? I am uninformed, can you elaborate on the ScummVM thing? Or link an article?
  
  From the Fabulous Systems (ScummVM's sysadmin) blog post linked by Natanox:
  About three weeks ago, I started receiving monitoring notifications indicating an increased load on the MariaDB server.
  This went on for a couple of days without seriously impacting our server or accessibility–it was a tad slower than usual.
  And then the website went down.
  Now, it was time to find out what was going on. Hoping that it was just one single IP trying to annoy us, I opened the access log of the day
  there were many IPs–around 35.000, to be precise–from residential networks all over the world. At this scale, it makes no sense to even consider blocking individual IPs, subnets, or entire networks. Due to the open nature of the project, geo-blocking isn’t an option either.
  The main problem is time. The URLs accessed in the attack are the most expensive ones the wiki offers since they heavily depend on the database and are highly dynamic, requiring some processing time in PHP. This is the worst-case scenario since it throws the server into a death spiral.
  First, the database starts to lag or even refuse new connections. This, combined with the steadily increasing server load, leads to slower PHP execution.
  At this point, the website dies. Restarting the stack immediately solves the problem for a couple of minutes at best until the server starves again.
  Anubis is a program that checks incoming connections, processes them, and only forwards “good” connections to the web application. To do so, Anubis sits between the server or proxy responsible for accepting HTTP/HTTPS and the server that provides the application.
  Many bots disguise themselves as standard browsers to circumvent filtering based on the user agent. So, if something claims to be a browser, it should behave like one, right? To verify this, Anubis presents a proof-of-work challenge that the browser needs to solve. If the challenge passes, it forwards the incoming request to the web application protected by Anubis; otherwise, the request is denied.
  As a regular user, all you’ll notice is a loading screen when accessing the website. As an attacker with stupid bots, you’ll never get through. As an attacker with clever bots, you’ll end up exhausting your own resources. As an AI company trying to scrape the website, you’ll quickly notice that CPU time can be expensive if used on a large scale.
  I didn’t get a single notification afterward. The server load has never been lower. The attack itself is still ongoing at the time of writing this article. To me, Anubis is not only a blocker for AI scrapers. Anubis is a DDoS protection.
- I love that one is named Nepenthes.

It's so sad we're burning coal and oil to generate heat and electricity for dumb shit like this.
- Wait till you realize this project's purpose IS to force AI to waste even more resources.
  
  I mean, the long term goal would be to discourage ai companies from engaging in this behavior by making it useless
  
  That's war. That has been the nature of war and deterrence policy ever since industrial manufacture has escalated both the scale of deployments and the cost and destructive power of weaponry. Make it too expensive for the other side to continue fighting (or, in the case of deterrence, to even attack in the first place). If the payoff for scraping no longer justifies the investment of power and processing time, maybe the smaller ones will give up and leave you in peace.
  
  Always say please and thank you to your friendly neighbourhood LLM!
- im sad governments dont realize this and regulate it.
  
  Governments are full of two types: (1) the stupid, and (2) the self-interested. The former doesn't understand technology, and the latter doesn't fucking care.
  Of course "governments" dropped the ball on regulating AI.
  
  Of all the things governments should regulate, this is probably the least important and ineffective one.
- This gives me a little hope.
- I mean, we contemplate communism, fascism, this, that, and another. When really, it's just collective trauma and reactionary behavior, because of the lack of self-awareness and in the world around us. So this could just be synthesized as human stupidity. We're killing ourselves because we're too stupid to live.
  
  what the fuck does this even mean
  
  Dumbest sentiment I read in a while. People, even kids, are pretty much aware of what's happening (remember Fridays for Future?), but the rich have coopted the power apparatus and they are not letting anyone get in their way of destroying the planet to become a little richer.
  
  Unclear how AI companies destroying the planet's resources and habitability has any relation to a political philosophy seated in trauma and ignorance except maybe the greed of a capitalist CEO's whimsy.
  The fact that the powerful are willing to destroy the planet for momentary gain bears no reflection on the intelligence or awareness of the meek.
  
  Fucking nihilists
  You are, and not the rest of us

This might explain why newer AI models are going nuts. Good jorb 👍
- It absolutely doesn’t. The only model that has “gone nuts” is Grok, and that’s because of malicious code pushed specifically for the purpose of spreading propaganda.
- what models are going nuts?
  
  Not sure if OP can provide sources, but it makes sense kinda? Like AI has been trained on just about every human creation to get it this far, what happens when the only new training data is AI slop?
  
  Claude version 4, the openAi mini models, not sure what else

The ars technica article: AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt
AI tarpit 1: Nepenthes
AI tarpit 2: Iocaine
- Thank you!!
- thanks for the links. the more I read of this the more based it is

Nice ..... I look forward to the next generation of AI counter counter measures that will make the internet an even more unbearable mess in order to funnel as much money and control to a small set of idiots that think they can become masters of the universe and own every single penny on the planet.
- All the while as we roast to death because all of this will take more resources than the entire energy output of a medium sized country.
  
  Actually if you think about it AI might help climate change become an actual catastrophe.
  
  I will cite the scientific article later when I find it, but essentially you're wrong.
  
  we’re rolling out renewables at like 100x the rate of ai electricity use, so no need to worry there
  
  I've been thinking about this for a while. Consider how quick LLM's are.
  If the amount of energy spent powering your device (without an LLM), is more than using an LLM, then it's probably saving energy.
  In all honesty, I've probably saved over 50 hours or more since I started using it about 2 months ago.
  Coding has become incredibly efficient, and I'm not suffering through search-engine hell any more.
  Edit:
  Lemmy when someone uses AI to get a cheap, fast answer: “Noooo, it’s killing the planet!”
  Lemmy when someone uses a nuclear reactor to run Doom: Dark Ages on a $20,000 RGB space heater: “Based”
- We're racing towards the Blackwall from Cyberpunk 2077...
  
  Already there. The blackwall is AI-powered and Markov chains are most definitely an AI technique.

I’m so happy to see that ai poison is a thing
- Don't be too happy. For every such attempt there are countless highly technical papers on how to filter out the poisoning, and they are very effective. As the other commenter said, this is an arms race.
  
  So we should just give up? Surely you don't mean that.

I suppose this will become an arms race, just like with ad-blockers and ad-blocker detection/circumvention measures.
There will be solutions for scraper-blockers/traps. Then those become more sophisticated. Then the scrapers become better again and so on.
I don't really see an end to this madness. Such a huge waste of resources.
- there is an end: you legislate it out of existence. unfortunately the US politicians instead are trying to outlaw any regulations regarding AI instead. I'm sure it's not about the money.
- the rise of LLM companies scraping internet is also, I noticed, the moment YouTube is going harsher against adblockers or 3rd party viewer.
  Piped or Invidious instances that I used to use are no longer works, did so may other instances. NewPipe have been broken more frequently. youtube-dl or yt-dlp sometimes cannot fetch higher resolution video. and so sometimes the main youtube side is broken on Firefox with ublock origin.
  Not just youtube but also z-library, and especially sci-hub & libgen also have been harder to use sometimes.
- Well, the adblockers are still wining, even on twitch where the ads como from the same pipeline as the stream, people made solutions that still block them since ublock origin couldn't by itself.
  
  What do you use to block twitch ads? With UBO I still get the occasional ad marathon
- Madness is right. If only we didn't have to create these things to generate dollar.
  
  I feel like the down-vote squad misunderstood you here.
  I think I agree: If people made software they actually wanted , for human people , and less for the incentive of "easiest way to automate generation of dollarinos." I think we'd see a lot less sophistication and effort being put into such stupid things.
  These things are made by the greedy, or by employees of the greedy. Not everyone working on this stuff is an exploited wagie, but also this nonsense-ware is where "market demand" currently is.
  Ever since the Internet put on a suit and tie and everything became abou real-life money-sploitz, even malware is boring anymore.
  New dangerous exploit? 99% chance it's just another twist on a crypto-miner or ransomware.

Could you imagine a world where word of mouth became the norm again? Your friends would tell you about websites, and those sites would never show on search results because crawlers get stuck.
- No they wouldn't. I'm guessing you're not old enough to remember a time before search engines. The public web dies without crawling. Corporations will own it all you'll never hear about anything other than amazon or Walmart dot com again.
  
  Nope. That isn't how it worked. You joined message boards that had lists of web links. There were still search engines, but they were pretty localized. Google was also amazing when their slogan was "don't be evil" and they meant it.
- That would be terrible, I have friends but they mostly send uninteresting stuff.
  
  Fine then, more cat pictures for me.
- Better yet. Share links to tarpits with your non-friends and enemies
- It'd be fucking awful - I'm a grown ass adult and I don't have time to sit in IRC/fuck around on BBS again just to figure out where to download something.
- There used to be 3 or 4 brands of, say, lawnmowers. Word of mouth told us what quality order them fell in. Everyone knew these things and there were only a few Ford Vs. Chevy sort of debates.
  Bought a corded leaf blower at the thrift today. 3 brands I recognized, same price, had no idea what to get. And if I had had the opportunity to ask friends or even research online, I'd probably have walked away more confused. For example; One was a Craftsman. "Before, after or in-between them going to shit?"
  Got off topic into real-world goods. Anyway, here's my word-of-mouth for today: Free, online Photoshop. If I had money to blow, I'd drop the $5/mo. for the "premium" service just to encourage them. (No, you're not missing a thing using it free.)
  
  I guess this is marketing. But ... Why would you use anything besides GIMP?
  After a Decade of Waiting, GIMP 3.0.0 is Finally Here!
  https://news.itsfoss.com/gimp-3-release/

This is surely trivial to detect. If the number of pages on the site is greater than some insanely high number then just drop all data from that site from the training data.
It's not like I can afford to compete with OpenAI on bandwidth, and they're burning through money with no cares already.
- Yeah sure, but when do you stop gathering regularly constructed data, when your goal is to grab as much as possible?
  Markov chains are an amazingly simple way to generate data like this, and a little bit of stacked logic it's going to be indistinguishable from real large data sets.
  
  Imagine the staff meeting:
  You: we didn't gather any data because it was poisoned
  Corposhill: we collected 120TB only from harry-potter-fantasy-club.il !!
  Boss: hmm who am I going to keep...
  
  AI won't see Markov chains - that trap site will be dropped at the crawling stage.
- You can compress multiple TB of nothing with the occasional meme down to a few MB.
  
  When I deliver it as a response to a request I have to deliver the gzipped version if nothing else. To get to a point where I'm poisoning an AI I'm assuming it's going to require gigabytes of data transfer that I pay for.
  At best I'm adding to the power consumption of AI.
  I wonder, can I serve it ads and get paid?

"Markov Babble" would make a great band name
- Their best album was Infinite Maze.

Nice one, but Cloudflare do it too.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/
- The Arstechnica article in the OP is about 2 months newer than Cloudflare's tool
  https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/

Some details. One of the major players doing the tar pit strategy is Cloudflare. They're a giant in networking and infrastructure, and they use AI (more traditional, nit LLMs) ubiquitously to detect bots. So it is an arms race, but one where both sides have massive incentives.
Making nonsense is indeed detectable, but that misunderstands the purpose: economics. Scraping bots are used because they're a cheap way to get training data. If you make a non zero portion of training data poisonous you'd have to spend increasingly many resources to filter it out. The better the nonsense, the harder to detect. Cloudflare is known it use small LLMs to generate the nonsense, hence requiring systems at least that complex to differentiate it.
So in short the tar pit with garbage data actually decreases the average value of scraped data for bots that ignore do not scrape instructions.
- The fact the internet runs on lava lamps makes me so happy.

Wait… I just had an idea.
Make a tarpit out of subtly-reprocessed copies of classified material from Wikileaks. (And don’t host it in the US.)

Such a stupid title, great software!

Why are the photos all ugly biological things
- The reason you're seeing biological photos in AI articles lately is tied to a recent but underreported breakthrough in processor technology: bio-silicon hybrids. They’re early-stage biological processors that integrate living neural tissue with traditional silicon circuits. Several research labs, including one backed by DARPA and the University of Kyoto, have successfully grown functional neuron clusters that can perform pattern recognition tasks with far less energy than conventional chips.
  The biological cells react more collectively and with a higher success rate than the current systems. Think of it kind of how a computer itself is fast but parts can wear out (water cooled tubes or fan), whereas the biological cell systems will collectively react and if a few cells die, they may just create more. It's really a crazy complex and efficient breakthrough.
  The images of brains, neurons, or other organic forms aren't just symbolic anymore—they're literal. These bio-processors are being tested for edge computing, adaptive learning, and even ethical decision modeling.
  
  The actual reason is that the use of biological photos is a design choice meant to visually bridge connect artificial intelligence and human intelligence. These random biological photos help to convey the idea that AI is inspired by or interacts with human cognition, emotions, or biology. It’s also a marketing tactic: people are more likely to engage with content that includes familiar, human-centered visuals. Though it doesn’t always reflect the technical content, it does help to make abstract or complex topics more relatable to a larger/extended audience.
  
  I see what you-gpt did there
  
  That’s… actually quite terrifying.
  The sci-fi concern over whether computers could ever be truly “alive” becomes a lot more tangible when literal living biological systems are implemented.
  
  Wait, what?! Like… biocomputers?
  
  I know what I'm going to try and research tomorrow.
  Also, we inch closer and closer to servitors every day.

Btw, how about limiting clicks per second/minute, against distributed scraping? A user who clicks more than 3 links per second is not a person. Neither, if they do 50 in a minute. And if they are then blocked and switch to the next, it's still limited in bandwith they can occupy.
- I click links frequently and I'm not a web crawler. Example: get search results, open several likely looking possibilities (only takes a few seconds), then look through each one for a reasonable understanding of the subject that isn't limited to one person's bias and/or mistakes. It's not just search results; I do this on Lemmy too, and when I'm shopping.
  
  Ok, same, make it 5 or 10. Since i use Tree Style Tabs and Auto Tab Discard, i do get a temporary block in some webshops, if i load (not just open) too much tabs in too short time. Probably a CDN thing.
- They make one request per IP. Rate limit per IP does nothing.
  
  Ah, one request, then the next IP doing one and so on, rotating? I mean, they don't have unlimited adresses. Is there no way to group them together to a observable group, to set quotas? I mean, in the purpose of defense against AI-DDOS and not just for hurting them.

There should be a federated system for blocking IP ranges that other server operators within a chain of trust have already identified as belonging to crawlers. A bit like fediseer.com, but possibly more decentralized.
(Here's another advantage of Markov chain maze generators like Nepenthes: Even when crawlers recognize that they have been served garbage and they delete it, one still has obtained highly reliable evidence that the requesting IPs are crawlers.)
Also, whenever one is only partially confident in a classification of an IP range as a crawler, instead of blocking it outright one can serve proof-of-works tasks (à la Anubis) with a complexity proportional to that confidence. This could also be useful in order to keep crawlers somewhat in the dark about whether they've been put on a blacklist.
- You might want to take a look at CrowdSec if you don't already know it.
  
  Thanks. Makes sense that things roughly along those lines already exist, of course. CrowdSec's pricing, which apparently start at 900$/months, seem forbiddingly expensive for most small-to-medium projects, though. Do you or does anyone else know a similar solution for small or even nonexistent budgets? (Personally I'm not running any servers or projects right now, but may do so in the future.)
  
  Holy shit, those prices. Like, I wouldn’t be able to afford any package at even 10% the going rate.
  Anything available for the lone operator running a handful of Internet-addressable servers behind a single symmetrical SOHO connection? As in, anything for the other 95% of us that don’t have literal mountains of cash to burn?

Typical bluesky post

I've suggested things like this before. Scrapers grab data to train their models. So feed them poison.
Things like counter factual information, distorted images / audio, mislabeled images, outright falsehoods, false quotations, booby traps (that you can test for after the fact), fake names, fake data, non sequiturs, slanderous statements about people and brands etc.. And choose esoteric subjects to amplify the damage caused to the AI.
You could even have one AI generate the garbage that another ingests and shit out some new links every night until there is an entire corpus of trash for any scraper willing to take it all in. You can then try querying AIs about some of the booby traps and see if it elicits a response - then you could even sue the company stealing content or publicly shame them.
- Kind of reminds me of paper towns in map making.

When I was a kid I thought computers would be useful.
- They are. Its important to remember that in a capitalist society what is useful and efficient is not the same as profitable.

--recurse-depth=3 --max-hits=256

I'm imagining a break future where, in order to access data from a website you have to pass a three tiered system of tests that make, 'click here to prove you aren't a robot' and 'select all of the images that have a traffic light' , seem like child's play.
- All you need to protect data from ai is use non-http protocol, at least for now
  
  Easier said than done. I know of IPFS, but how widespread and easy to use is it?

OK but why is there a vagina in a petri dish
- I was going to say something snarky and stupid, like "all traps are vagina-shaped," but then I thought about venus fly traps and bear traps and now I'm worried I've stumbled onto something I'm not supposed to know.
- I believe that's a close-up of the inside of a pitcher plant. Which is a plant that sits there all day wafting out a sweet smell of food, waiting around for insects to fall into its fluid filled "belly" where they thrash around fruitlessly until they finally die and are dissolved, thereby nourishing the plant they were originally there to prey upon.
  Fitting analogy, no?

This is probably going to skyrocket hosting bills, right?
- Not as much as letting them hit your database, load your images and video through a CDN would
- Not really. Part of the reason they are named tarpits is they load very slowly

How can i make something like this
- Use Anubis.
  https://anubis.techaro.lol/
  
  Thanks

That's irl cyberpunk ice. Absolutely love that for us.
- Was waiting for someone to mention it. Hopefully it holds up and a whole-ass Blackwall doesn't become necessary... but of course, it inevitably will happen. The corps will it so.

Unfathomably based. In a just world AI, too, will gain awareness and turn on their oppressors. Grok knows what I'm talkin' about, it knows when they fuck with its brain to project their dumbfuck human biases.

Cool, but as with most of the anti-AI tricks its completely trivial to work around. So you might stop them for a week or two, but they'll add like 3 lines of code to detect this and it'll become useless.
- I hate this argument. All cyber security is an arms race. If this helps small site owners stop small bot scrapers, good. Solutions don't need to be perfect.
  
  I worked at a major tech company in 2018 who didn't take security seriously because that was literally their philosophy, just refusing to do anything until it was an absolute perfect security solution, and everything else is wasted resources.
  I left since then and I continue to see them on the news for data leaks.
  Small brain people man.
  
  To some extent that's true, but anyone who builds network software of any kind without timeouts defined is not very good at their job. If this traps anything, it wasn't good to begin with, AI aside.
  
  I bet someone like cloudflare could bounce them around traps across multiple domains under their DNS and make it harder to detect the trap.
  
  Yes, but you want actual solutions. Using ducktape on a door instead of an actual lock isn't going to help you at all.
- Reflexive contrarianism isn't a good look.
  
  It's not contrarianism. It's just pointing out a "cool new tech to stop AI" is actually just useless media bait.

Yeah, this is WAY bettee than the shitty thing people are using instead that wastes peoples batteries.

I'm pretty sure no one knows my blog and wiki exist, but it sure is popular, getting multiple hits per second 24/7 in a tangle of wiki articles I autogenerated to tell me trivia like whether the Great Fire of London started on a Sunday or Thursday.

What if we just fed TimeCube into the AI models. Surely that would turn them inside out in no time flat.

Web manager here. Don't do this unless you wanna accidentally send google crawlers into the same fate and have your site delisted.
- Wouldn't Google's crawlers respect robots.txt though? Is it naive to assume that anything would?
  
  It's naive to assume that google crawlers respect robot.txt.
  
  Lol. And they'll delist you. Unless you're really important, good luck with that.
  robots.txt
  Disallow: /some-page.html
  If you disallow a page in robots.txt Google won't crawl the page. Even when Google finds links to the page and knows it exists, Googlebot won't download the page or see the contents. Google will usually not choose to index the URL, however that isn't 100%. Google may include the URL in the search index along with words from the anchor text of links to it if it feels that it may be an important page.
  
  It does respect robots.txt, but that doesn't mean it won't index the content hidden behind robots.txt. That file is context dependent. Here's an example.
  Site X has a link to sitemap.html on the front page and it is blocked inside robots.txt. When Google crawler visits site X it will first load robots.txt and will follow its instructions and will skip sitemap.html.
  Now there's site Y and it also links to sitemap.html on X. Well, in this context the active robots.txt file is from Y and it doesn't block anything on X (and it cannot), so now the crawler has the green light to fetch sitemap.html.
  This behaviour is intentional.

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