this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 days ago by pelespirit@sh.itjust.works to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 days ago (3 children)

It's not. If it was, every search engine out there would be belly up at the first nested link.

Google/Bing just consume their own crawling traffic. You don't want to NOT show up in search queries right?

[–] ubergeek@lemmy.today 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

You don’t want to NOT show up in search queries right?

At this point?

I am fully ok NOT being in search engines for any of my sites. Organic traffic has always been much more valuable than inorganic traffic.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Your definition of organic traffic is off-standard. When people say organic, they generally mean non-paid, including returns on web search.

The VAST majority of the web would have almost no traffic without web searches. It's not like people flock to sites from talking about it around the water cooler.

[–] ubergeek@lemmy.today 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Your definition of organic traffic is off-standard.

Fair.

The VAST majority of the web would have almost no traffic without web searches. It’s not like people flock to sites from talking about it around the water cooler.

Which is a shame, tbh. We had far better content, when people had to work to create good content, that others wanted, and got passed around.

ie, in school, before search engines, we all knew about Whitehouse.com... We all knew the sites that had the info we wanted/needed at the time.

In fact, I'd argue the downfall of the web as an actual useful tool came about once search engines automatically started indexing, rather than submitting site maps to a page like OpenDirectory to have your site cataloged, indexed, and sorted into appropriate categories by a human.

Because once people started working on "gaming algos" rather than "Making super good content", the internet just became the new "Malls" where you weren't expected to learn, you were just expected to buy.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 2 points 5 hours ago

I liked it back when link aggregators were the go-to for discovery. You could have sites that were real gems that were just tucked away.

I think the indexing started out ok. Counting backlinks and using that as a ranking was pretty genius, right up until people realized they could game the system, then google realized that artificially screwing with their own system was worth money, then the used ads to modify ranking.

ads to modify discoverability the death of free internet

[–] flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

They follow robots.txt

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 1 points 6 hours ago

"Web Scrapers: Many web scrapers and bots do not respect robots.txt at all, as they are often designed to extract data regardless of the site's crawling policies. This can include malicious bots or those used for data mining."

[–] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's unclear how much damage tarpits or other AI attacks can ultimately do. Last May, Laxmi Korada, Microsoft's director of partner technology, published a report detailing how leading AI companies were coping with poisoning, one of the earliest AI defense tactics deployed. He noted that all companies have developed poisoning countermeasures, while OpenAI "has been quite vigilant" and excels at detecting the "first signs of data poisoning attempts."

Despite these efforts, he concluded that data poisoning was "a serious threat to machine learning models." And in 2025, tarpitting represents a new threat, potentially increasing the costs of fresh data at a moment when AI companies are heavily investing and competing to innovate quickly while rarely turning significant profits.

"A link to a Nepenthes location from your site will flood out valid URLs within your site's domain name, making it unlikely the crawler will access real content," a Nepenthes explainer reads.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Same problems with tarpitting. They search engines are doing the crawling for each of their own companies, you don't want to poison your own search results.

Conceptually, they'll stop being search crawls altogether and if you expect to get any traffic it'll come from AI crawls :/

[–] umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think to use it defensively, you should put the path into robots.txt, and only those doesn't follows the rule will be greeted with the maze. For proper search engine crawler, that's should be the standard behavior.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 day ago

Spiders already detect link bombs, recursion bombs, they're capable of rendering the page out in memory to see what's truly visible.

It's a great idea but it's a really old trick and it's already been covered.