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AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will "eat just about anything that finds its way inside."

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It's not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an "infinite maze" of static files with no exit links, where they "get stuck" and "thrash around" for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That's likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn.

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[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 day ago

so they will have threads caught in pit and other threads stealing content. not only did you waste time with a tar pit your content still gets stolen.

any scraper worth its salt, especially with LLMs, would have garbage detection of sorts, so poisoning the model is likely not effective. they likely have more resources than you so a few spinning threads is trivial. all the while your server still has to service all these requests for garbage that is likely ineffective wasting that bandwidth you have to pay for, cycles that can be better served actually doing somehthing, and your content STILL gets stolen.