alt Hacker NewsI've spent the last few days adding traps to one of my websites, ironically using LLMs of course, and I've been having quite a lot of fun doing it.
Instead of the proof-of-work system of Anubis, I've gone down the iocaine route but implemented it in my application itself, as it's built in Elixir and causing problems for scrapers is really fun when it takes almost no server resources.
Currently I trick bad scrapers into a fake infinite black hole path with the promise of tasty data, then serve images to them one byte at a time over 15 minutes (after sending the header quickly), bloat the responses to cost them tokens, and randomly return AI generated images of sexy toasters. I have an admin dashboard with a little leaderboard for which ones get the most stuffed, and it keeps my heart warm on these wet autumn evenings.
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> I have an admin dashboard with a little leaderboard for which ones get the most stuffed
You can't tease us like that without showing screenshots.
Have you considered releasing any of this as a plug for phoenix or similar?
I’ve also toyed with this approach and have a similar labyrinth on my website, but it just serves back huge amounts of meaningless text one word at a time.
Probably they must be deduplicating text they've seen before.
The only punishment would be unique text that trains their models to be degenerate. And even then you'd probably have to serve across many domains.
wouldn't that just make your connection load worse?
How do you reliably detect the bots? Instead of slowban, I would feed it something abhorrent like an archive of 4chan posts.
You can't tease us with that and not share any information! ;-)
what constitutes as a bad crawler and what information do you have that's attracting so many bots?
I had to look up what iocaine route is. Here's an article that explains well:
https://firesphere.dev/articles/iocaine-the-deadliest-poison...