this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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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.

“It's less like flypaper and more an infinite maze holding a minotaur, except the crawler is the minotaur that cannot get out. 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.

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 day ago (3 children)

But does running this cost the AI bot at least as much as it costs you to run?

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Picking words at random from a dictionary would not be very compute intensive, the content doesn't need to be sensical

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes, the scraper is going to mindlessly gobble up information. At best they'd expend more resources later to try and determine the value of the content but how do you do that really? Mostly I think they're hoping the good will outweigh the bad.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

It honestly depends. There are random drive by scrapers that will just do what they can, usually within a specific budget for a domain and move on. If you have something specific though that someone wants you end up in an arms race pretty quickly as they will pay attention and tune their crawler daily.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I was thinking exactly that, generating something like lorem ipsum to cost both time, compute and storage for the crawler.

It will be more complex and require more resources tho.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago

I'd like to introduce you to Pandora's Pot

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I would think yes. The compute needed to make a hyperlink maze is low, compared to the AI processing of the random content, which costs nearly nothing to make, but still costs the same to process as genuine content.

Am I missing something?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm wondering about the cost to the server's resources / bandwidth to serve up unlimited random junk also.

But kudos to the developer for making this anyway

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago

This is my concern exactly.

This seems like a neat prank, but a potentially expensive one. Heck, if it works right you could end up with several bots stuck in your maze, perhaps dozens of hundreds. At that point bandwidth becomes my concern.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

It does if you use AI to generate the pages it's scraping.