It's so sad we're burning coal and oil to generate heat and electricity for dumb shit like this.
Wait till you realize this project's purpose IS to force AI to waste even more resources.
This gives me a little hope.
I mean, we contemplate communism, fascism, this, that, and another. When really, it's just collective trauma and reactionary behavior, because of the lack of self-awareness and in the world around us. So this could just be synthesized as human stupidity. We're killing ourselves because we're too stupid to live.
Could you imagine a world where word of mouth became the norm again? Your friends would tell you about websites, and those sites would never show on search results because crawlers get stuck.
No they wouldn't. I'm guessing you're not old enough to remember a time before search engines. The public web dies without crawling. Corporations will own it all you'll never hear about anything other than amazon or Walmart dot com again.
Nope. That isn't how it worked. You joined message boards that had lists of web links. There were still search engines, but they were pretty localized. Google was also amazing when their slogan was "don't be evil" and they meant it.
Deployment of Nepenthes and also Anubis (both described as "the nuclear option") are not hate. It's self-defense against pure selfish evil, projects are being sucked dry and some like ScummVM could only freakin' survive thanks to these tools.
Those AI companies and data scrapers/broker companies shall perish, and whoever wrote this headline at arstechnica shall step on Lego each morning for the next 6 months.
Feels good to be on an instance with Anubis
Do you have a link to a story of what happened to ScummVM? I love that project and I’d be really upset if it was lost!
one of the united Nations websites deployed Anubis
Wait what? I am uninformed, can you elaborate on the ScummVM thing? Or link an article?
Wait… I just had an idea.
Make a tarpit out of subtly-reprocessed copies of classified material from Wikileaks. (And don’t host it in the US.)
"Markov Babble" would make a great band name
AI is the "most aggressive" example of "technologies that are not done 'for us' but 'to us.'"
Well said.
That's irl cyberpunk ice. Absolutely love that for us.
Funny that they’re calling them AI haters when they’re specifically poisoning AI that ignores the do not enter sign. FAFO.
The ars technica article: AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt
AI tarpit 1: Nepenthes
AI tarpit 2: Iocaine
thanks for the links. the more I read of this the more based it is
Thank you!!
Web manager here. Don't do this unless you wanna accidentally send google crawlers into the same fate and have your site delisted.
Wouldn't Google's crawlers respect robots.txt though? Is it naive to assume that anything would?
Lol. And they'll delist you. Unless you're really important, good luck with that.
robots.txt
Disallow: /some-page.html
If you disallow a page in robots.txt Google won't crawl the page. Even when Google finds links to the page and knows it exists, Googlebot won't download the page or see the contents. Google will usually not choose to index the URL, however that isn't 100%. Google may include the URL in the search index along with words from the anchor text of links to it if it feels that it may be an important page.
It's naive to assume that google crawlers respect robot.txt.
It'd be more naive to have a robot.txt file on your webserver and be surprised when webcrawlers don't stay away. 😂
Nice ..... I look forward to the next generation of AI counter counter measures that will make the internet an even more unbearable mess in order to funnel as much money and control to a small set of idiots that think they can become masters of the universe and own every single penny on the planet.
All the while as we roast to death because all of this will take more resources than the entire energy output of a medium sized country.
Actually if you think about it AI might help climate change become an actual catastrophe.
It is already!
This might explain why newer AI models are going nuts. Good jorb 👍
It absolutely doesn’t. The only model that has “gone nuts” is Grok, and that’s because of malicious code pushed specifically for the purpose of spreading propaganda.
what models are going nuts?
Nice one, but Cloudflare do it too.
The Arstechnica article in the OP is about 2 months newer than Cloudflare's tool
This is probably going to skyrocket hosting bills, right?
Not really. Part of the reason they are named tarpits is they load very slowly
The pages are plain html so it's just a couple KB per request. Much cheaper than loading an actual site.
Not as much as letting them hit your database, load your images and video through a CDN would
Why are the photos all ugly biological things
They were generated using shitty AI models.
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
