this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
894 points (98.1% liked)

Technology

60830 readers
4030 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
894
Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots (www.404media.co)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
123 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

DDoS? Where was the distribution part?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

effectively

For all practical purposes; in effect.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

I believe the commenter was implying that DoS would be a more accurate description, since it does not seem as if the "attack" was distributed, but it is a nitpick nonetheless. We don't have the context to understand if multiple servers were involved that distributed the load

[–] JackbyDev 5 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

I see DDoS and DoS used interchangeably. I think because DDoS became a somewhat mainstream term (at least in online gamer communities) and is pronounced verbally (dee doss). Idk, just what I've seen.

Like people calling roguelites roguelikes or third person shooters FPSes

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

Yes in casual conversation I always say "DDoS" regardless of whether or not it's distributed because "DoS" makes people think of the operating system.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Dee doss? I always say dee dee oh es.