Ancestors

Written by Aaron on 2025-01-14 at 22:58

• KICKS DOOR DOWN*

Hey everyone! Hate AI web crawlers? Have some spare CPU cycles you want to use to punish them?

Meet Nepenthes!

https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes

This little guy runs nicely on low power hardware, and generates an infinite maze of what appear to be static files with no exit links. Web crawlers will merrily hop right in and just .... get stuck in there! Optional randomized delay to waste their time and conserve your CPU, optional markovbabble to poison large language models.

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Written by corbẏn on 2025-01-15 at 07:44

@aaron Doesn't this worsen the AI crawlers energy and carbon footprint instead of dropping their connection?

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Written by Aaron on 2025-01-15 at 07:59

@a_corbin Few to zero reasonable humans will click more than a dozen links inside the tarpit - so the gathered hit statistics can be used to aggregate a block list for dropping connections. That's a valid use case I intend to support.

Another major feature is the connection delay. I've kept crawlers waiting upwards of an entire minute for a single page to load - an entire minute during which they've could have slurped down dozens of real pages elsewhere on the internet. This really hurts them.

Lastly, and I admit this is ugly and cold blooded, I see this as a war. War by definition is a waste of resources on both sides: I'm burning CPU time I've paid for to send them literal shit, in hopes the poisoning of their models costs them exponentially more than it costs me, hoping to push them into bankruptcy faster.

Because this is a bubble. It will eventually pop. It's simply too expensive for the debatable benefits viewed from any angle. The best thing for the planet is to pop the bubble ASAP and that's what I'm trying to speed up, fully aware it may hurt the planet somewhat more in the short term.

You are welcome to disagree with my calculus.

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Written by cuan_knaggs on 2025-01-15 at 11:14

@aaron @a_corbin another option i've been contemplating is to give them 301 redirects to their own services

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Toot

Written by Aaron on 2025-01-15 at 14:29

@mensrea Oooof. I like that!

I've also considered various gzip bombs and an infinite chain of 302 redirects. Might still implement those one day.

@a_corbin

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