this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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Anyone who writes a spider that's going to inspect all the content out there is already going to have to have dealt with this, along with about a bazillion other kinds of oddball or bad data.
If you have billions of targets to scan, there's generally no need to handle each and every edge case. Just ignoring what you can't understand easily and jumping on to the next target is an absolutely viable strategy. You will never be able to process everything anyway.
Of course, it changes a bit if some of these targets actually make your bot crash. If it happens to often, you will want to harden your bot against it. Then again, if it just happens every now and then, it's still much easier to just restart and continue with the next target.
That's the usual case with arms races: Unless you are yourself a major power, odds are you'll never be able to fully stand up to one (at least not on your own, but let's not stretch the metaphor too far). Often, the best you can do is to deterr other, minor powers and hope major ones never have a serious intent to bring you down.
In this specific case, the number of potential minor "attackers" and the hurdle for "attack" mKe it attractive to try to overwhelm the amateurs at least. You'll never get the pros, you just hope they don't bother you too much.