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

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

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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] 4 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

What's the context?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

The modern internet. Millions of hits is very normal - one of my domains is just 30 year old ASCII art of a penguin, and it gets 2-3 million a month from bots/crawlers (nearly all of them trying common exploits). The idea that the google spider would be notably negatively impacted by this is kinda naive. It could fall fully into the tarpit and it probably wouldn't even get flagged as an abnormal resource allocation. The difference in power between desktop and enterprise equipment is at this point almost inexpressible.

[–] JackbyDev 3 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

People think of hacking like a thief with a lockpick. It's oftentimes more like someone methodically checking every door in the neighborhood for any that are unlocked.