Advice on how to deal with AI bots/scrapers?
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What are you hosting and who are your users? Do you receive any legitimate traffic from AWS or other cloud provider IP addresses? There will always be edge cases like people hosting VPN exit nodes on a VPS etc, but if its a tiny portion of your legitimate traffic I would consider blocking all incoming traffic from cloud providers and then whitelisting any that make sense like search engine crawlers if necessary.
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Build tar pits.
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They want to reduce the bandwidth usage. Not increase it!
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Cool, lots of information provided!
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Too bad you can't post a usage notice that anything scrapped to train an AI will be charged and will owe $some-huge-money, then pepper the site with bogus facts, occasionally ask various AI about the bogus fact and use that to prove scraping and invoice the AI's company.
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Bots will blacklist your IP if you make it hostile to bots
This will save you bandwidth
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A good tar pit will reduce your bandwidth. Tarpits aren't about shoving useless data at bots; they're about responding as slow as possible to keep the bot connected for as long as possible while giving it nothing.
Endlessh accepts the connection and then... does nothing. It doesn't even actually perform the SSL negotiation. It just very... slowly... sends... an endless preamble, until the bot gives up.
As I write, my Internet-facing SSH tarpit currently has 27 clients trapped in it. A few of these have been connected for weeks. In one particular spike it had 1,378 clients trapped at once, lasting about 20 hours.
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there is also https://forge.hackers.town/hackers.town/nepenthes
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Read access logs and 403 user agents or IPs
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I guess sending tar bombs can be fun
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Now I just wan't to host a web page and expose it with nepenthes...
First, because I'm a big fan of carnivorous plants.
Second, because it let's you poison LLMs, AI and fuck with their data.
Lastly, because I can do my part and say F#CK Y0U to those privacy data hungry a$$holes !
I don't even expose anything directly to the web (always accessible through a tunnel like wireguard) or have any important data to protect from AI or LLMs. But just giving the opportunity to fuck with them while they continuously harvest data from everyone is something I was already thinking off but didn't knew how.
Thanks for the link !
