OK but why is there a vagina in a petri dish
this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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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.
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.
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.
--recurse-depth=3 --max-hits=256
Such a stupid title, great software!
Typical bluesky post
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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How can i make something like this
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