Technology

37920 readers

55 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social

119

Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots (www.404media.co)

submitted 6 days ago by UrLogicFails to c/technology

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Archive.org link

Some key excerpts:

A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source “tar pit” to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage owners to protect their own content from being scraped or can be deployed “offensively” as a honeypot trap to waste AI companies’ resources.

The typical web crawler doesn't appear to have a lot of logic. It downloads a URL, and if it sees links to other URLs, it downloads those too. Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself - the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself,” Aaron B, the creator of Nepenthes, told 404 Media.

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] UrLogicFails 5 points 6 days ago (2 children)

I don't have a full picture idea yet, but I would probably upload art/ projects/ WIPs. I also was considering adding writings, but I'm not sure if there would be enough there to have a section for writings.

I definitely don't have as much to share as others, but I would like to see the Internet become a less centralized space.

An author I follow on Bluesky has been talking about neocities a lot and it seems pretty silly and fun. You probably need to be signed in to view this, but you can see her talk about the process here.

[–] westyvw@lemm.ee 7 points 6 days ago

I still run websites. Some simple and static, others forums, yet others are blogs.

I like to have small communities around simple interests and they get enough traffic to stay interesting.

The blogs are for recording things I do and want to remember and share, like setting up postgres to do interesting things.

None of them have ads or generate revenue. I just miss the old internet and like to see these things exist.

At the same time, I don't really care if AI scrapes it. It's out there to be looked at. Of course one website is a complete farce, illogical and fake product nonsense. I enjoy it getting scraped the most.

[–] ericjmorey 5 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Seems like you'd be interested in https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/

I hope you find a way to share your works.

[–] SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Highly recommend this, we've got a few of the compliations from this magazine in print