This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Yeah, that has like 0 chances for working. At most it would annoy bots for web search, at least it has a proper robots.txt.
But any agent trying to process data for AI is not going to go to random websites. It's going to use a curated list of sites with valuable content.
At this point text generation datasets can be achieved with open data, and data sold by companies like reddit or Microsoft, they don't need to "pirate" your blog posts.
scrape.maxDepth = 5
LOL wow, this is probably the most elegant way to say what I just said to somebody else. Well written web crawlers aren't like sci-fi robots that rock back and forth smoking when they hear something illogical.
What's stopping the sites with valuable content from using this?
A bot that's ignoring robots.txt is likely going to be pretending to be human. If your site has valuable content that you want to show to humans, how do you distinguish them from the bots?
What is robots.txt?
A file that "robots" are supposed to respect when they index a website. Here's Googles https://www.google.com/robots.txt
I think sites that feel they have valuable content can deploy this and hope to trap and perhaps detect those bots based on how they interact with the tarpit
True to a limited extent. Anyone can post a link to somebody's blog on a site like reddit without the blogger's permission, where a web crawler scanning through posts and comments would find it. But I agree with you that a thing like Nepehthes probably wouldn't work. Infinite loop detection is an important part of many types of software and there are well-known techniques for it, which as a developer I would assume a well written AI web crawler would have (although I've never personally made one).
What a great name!
This is really interesting.
My new favorite is asking if it's cheating to look at your opponent's pieces in chess.
This showed up on HN recently. Several people who wrote web crawlers pointed out that this won’t even come close to working except on terribly written crawlers. Most just limit the number of pages crawled per domain based on popularity of the domain. So they’ll index all of Wikipedia but they definitely won’t crawl all 1 million pages of your unranked website expecting to find quality content.
I think this rate limiting mechanism is mostly a niceness rule : you should try to not put too much pressure on any website and obey the rules defined in its robots.txt.
So I guess this idea is not bad as it would mostly penalize bad players.
Can confirm, I have a website (https://2009scape.org/) with tonnes of legacy forum posts (100k+). No crawlers ever go there.
It's a shame that 404media didn't do any due diligence when writing this
Sorry to tell you, but you are indexed at least by duckduckgo, bing, ecosia, startpage, google, and even one of searx' crawlers has payed you a visit.
I think you may have just misunderstood the post.
It's not intended to trap the web crawlers indexing content for google search.
It's intended to trap AI training bots harvesting sentences in order to improve their LLMs.
I don't really have an answer as to why those bots don't find your content appealing, but that doesn't mean that Nepenthes doesn't work.
No crawlers ever go there.
if it makes you feel any better, i would go there if i was a web crawler.
Did you read the article? (There is a link to a non walled version.)
Since they made and deployed a proof-of-concept, Aaron B said their pages have been hit millions of times by internet-scraping bots. On a Hacker News thread, someone claiming to be an AI company CEO said a tarpit like this is easy to avoid; Aaron B told 404 Media “If that’s, true, I’ve several million lines of access log that says even Google Almighty didn’t graduate” to avoiding the trap.
Millions of hits may sound like a lot, but you need to view that in context.
What's the context?
The modern internet. Millions of hits is very normal - one of my domains is just 30 year old ASCII art of a penguin, and it gets 2-3 million a month from bots/crawlers (nearly all of them trying common exploits). The idea that the google spider would be notably negatively impacted by this is kinda naive. It could fall fully into the tarpit and it probably wouldn't even get flagged as an abnormal resource allocation. The difference in power between desktop and enterprise equipment is at this point almost inexpressible.
People think of hacking like a thief with a lockpick. It's oftentimes more like someone methodically checking every door in the neighborhood for any that are unlocked.
If it is linked to the Internet then it'll be hit by crawlers. Their "trap" isn't any how many show up but how long each bot stays on their individual site.
More accurately, it traps any web crawler, including regular search engines and benign projects like the Internet Archive. This should not be used without an allowlist for known trusted crawlers at least.
But does running this cost the AI bot at least as much as it costs you to run?
Picking words at random from a dictionary would not be very compute intensive, the content doesn't need to be sensical
This sort of thing has been a strategy for dealing with unwanted web crawlers since web crawlers were a thing. It's an arms race, though; crawlers do things to detect these "mazes" and so the maze-makers keep needing to up their game as well.
As we enter an age where AI is effectively passing the Turing Test, it's going to be tricky making traps for them that don't also ensnare the actual humans you're trying to serve pages to.
This won't work against commercial crawlers. They check page contents with something similar to a simhash and don't recrawl these pages. They also have limiters like for depth to avoid getting stuck in circular links.
You could generate random content for each new page, but you'll still eventually hit the depth limit. There are probably other rules related to content quality to limit crawling too.
True, this is an arms race situation after all. The real benefit of this is creating garbage training data that makes garbage models. So it’s not just increasing the cost of crawling, it increases the cost of stealing everybody’s shit because you need extra data quality checks. Poisoning the well.
