I check if a user agent has gptbot, and if it does I 302 it to web.sp.am.
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!
Thank you!
Thanks, interesting and brief read!
Very cool, and the mascot is cute too as a nice bonus.
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
Here’s a thing - it’s not useless.
What use does an AI get out of scraping pages designed to confuse and mislead it?
Punishment for being stupid & greedy.
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.
Why?
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super hard to tell where electricity for certain computing task is coming from. What if I use 100% renewable for ai training offsetting it by using super cheap dirty electricity for other tasks
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who will audit what electricity is used for anyway? Any computer will have an government sealed rootkit?
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offshore
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a million problems that require more attention, from migration, to Healthcare, to economy
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you say that until ai agents start running scams and stealing your shit and running their own schemes where they get right wing politicans elected.
That’s already happening, how do you want the government to legislate against Russian, Chinese or American actors?
I kinda feel like we’re 75% of the way there already, and we gotta be hitting with everything we’ve got if we’re to stand a chance against it…
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
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.
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.
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 don’t think they meant that. Probably more like
“Don’t upload all your precious data carelessly thinking it’s un-stealable just because of this one countermeasure.”
Which of course, really sucks for artists.
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
https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions
I use the video swap one.
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.
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.
Such a stupid title, great software!
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…
The boss fires both, “replaces” them for AI, and tries to sell the corposhill’s dataset to companies that make AIs that write generic fantasy novels
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?
I wonder, can I serve it ads and get paid?
…and it’s just bouncing around and around and around in circles before its handler figures out what’s up…
Heehee I like where your head’s at!
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.
I was there. People carried physical notepads with URLs, shared them on BBS’, or other forums. It was wild.
There was also “circle banners” of websites that would link to each others… And then off course “stumble upon”…
Yes! Web rings!
I forgot web rings! Also the crazy all centered Geocities websites people made. The internet was an amazing place before the major corporations figured it out.
No. Only very selective people joined message boards. The rest were on AOL, compact or not at all. You’re taking a very select group of.people and expecting the Facebook and iPad generations to be able to do that. Not going to happen. I also noticed some people below talking about things like geocities and other minor free hosting and publishing site that are all gone now. They’re not coming back.
Yep, those things were so rarely used … sure. You are forgetting that 99% of people knew nothing about computers when this stuff came out, but people made themselves learn. It’s like comparing Reddit and Twitter to a federated alternative.
Also, something like geocities could easily make a comeback if the damn corporations would stop throwing dozens of pop-ups, banners, and sidescrolls on everything.
And 99% of people today STILL don’t know anything about computers. Go ask those same people simply “what is a file” they won’t know. Lmao. Geocities could come back if corporations stop advertising. Do you even hear yourself.
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/Removed by mod
How do you know that’s a bot please? Is it specifically a hot advertising that online photos hop equivalent? Is it a real software or scam? The whole approach is intriguing to me
Edit: I Will assume honesty in this instance. It’s because they’re advertising something in a very particular tone, to match what some Amerikaanse consider common language.
Normal people don’t do that.
“Markov Babble” would make a great band name
Their best album was Infinite Maze.
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.)
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.
Would you mind explaining your workflow with these tree style tabs? I am having a hard time picturing how they are used in practice and what benefits they bring.
deleted by creator
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’s always Anubis 🤷
Anyway, what if they are backed by some big Chinese corporation with some /32 ipv6 and some /16 ipv4? It’s not that unreasonable
No, I don’t think blocking IP ranges will be effective (except in very specific scenarios). See this comment referencing a blog post about this happening and the traffic was coming from a variety of residential IP allocations. https://lemm.ee/comment/20684186
my point was that even if they don’t have unlimited ips they might have a lot of them, especially if its ipv6, so you couldn’t just block them. but you can use anubis that doesn’t rely on ip filtering
You’re right, and Anubis was the solution they used. I just wanted to mention the IP thing because you did is all.
I hadn’t heard about Anubis before this thread. It’s cool! The idea of wasting some of my “resources” to get to a webpage sucks, but I guess that’s the reality we’re in. If it means a more human oriented internet then it’s worth it.
A lot of FOSS software’s websites are starting to use it lately, starting from the gnome foundation, that’s what popularized it.
The idea of proof of work itself came from spam emails, of all places. One proposed but never adopted way of preventing spam was hashcash, which required emails to have a proof of work embedded in the email. Bitcoins came after this borrowing the idea
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.)
There are many continuously updated IP blacklists on GitHub. Personally I have an automation that sources 10+ of such lists and blocks all IPs that appear on like 3 or more of them. I’m not sure there are any blacklists specific to “AI”, but as far as I know, most of them already included particularly annoying scrapers before the whole GPT craze.
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?
They do seem to have a free tier of sorts. I don’t use them personally, I only know of their existence and I’ve been meaning to give them a try. Seeing the pricing just now though, I might not even bother, unless the free tier is worth anything.
