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FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

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Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#181
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe just feed them dynamically generated garbage information? More fun than no information.

OP’s linked blog post mentioned they got hit with a large spike in bandwidth charges. Sending them garbage information costs money.

Yeah you have a point, hmmm, wish there were a way to somehow generate those garbages with minimum bandwidth. Something like, I can send you a very compressed 256 bytes of data which expands to something like 1 mega bytes.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#182
post #53

Perhaps time to start a central community ban pool for IP ranges?

There's already loads of these. The problem is that most of these IPs are just cloud providers or DC ISPs.

Or even worse, lots of them are using barely legal residential proxies so the requests are coming from everywhere. In Drew DeVault's article linked in this post he complained precisely about the residential-looking source IP addresses [0]. And I think I remember something about a Chinese company, some months ago, very aggressively scraping using that method.

Companies like DataImpulse [1] or ScraperAPI [2] will happily publicize their services with that specific target.

--

  0: https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me.html
  1: https://dataimpulse.com/use-cases/ai-proxies/
  2: https://www.scraperapi.com/solutions/ai-data/

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#183
post #57

We need a project in the spirit of Spamhaus to actively maintain a list of perpetrating IPs. If they're cycling through IPs and IP blocks I don't know how sustainable a CAPTCHA-like solution is.

Just block all of AWS, Alibaba, GCP and Azure, or throttle them aggressively. If you have clients/customers that need more requests per second then have them provide you with their IPs. The problem is that these companies are fairly well funded and renting infrastructure isn't an issue.

Exactly. They're renting infrastructure on well-known clouds, not cycling through consumer IPs like yesterday's botnets. Block all web traffic from well-known cloud IPs, and you can keep 99% of the LLM bots away. Alibaba seems to be the most common source of bot traffic on my infrastructure lately, and I also see Huawei Cloud from time to time. Not much AWS, probably because of their high IPv4 pricing.

You can allow API access from cloud IPs, as long as you don't do anything expensive before you've authenticated the client.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#184

Open source licenses are no longer strong enough. The copyright laundering use case was not been anticipated when the licenses were written. All licenses need a clause like the following: This software is for humans. AI training is prohibited and carries a default penalty of $1 trillion.

Huh? FOSS licenses work exactly like designed! I'm literally using MIT because I don't give a fuck what people do with the code I publish, limiting it to "humans" or restricting the usage makes it very not FOSS.

Sure, if you want to try to prevent AI training by licensing, do that, but it's no longer FOSS, so please don't call it that.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. And it is much more far reaching than that. Look at the primary economic claim offered by AI companies: to end the need for a substantial portion of all jobs on the planet. The entire vision is to remake the entire world into one where the owners of these companies own everything and are completely unconstrained. All intellectual property belongs to them. All labor belongs to them. Why would they need good will…

I have this line of thought as well but then I wonder, if we are all out of jobs and out of substantial capital to spend, how do these owners make money ultimately? It's a genuine question and I'm probably missing something obvious. I can see a benevolant/post-scarcity spin to this but the non-benevolant one seems self defeating.

"Making money" is only a relevant goal when you need money to persuade humans to do things for you.

Once you have an army of robot slaves ... you've rendered the whole concept of money irrelevant. Your skynet just barters rare earth metals with other skynets and your robot slaves furnish your desired lifestyle as best they can given the amount of rare earth metals your skynet can get its hands on. Or maybe a better skynet / slave army kills your skynet / slave army, but tough tits, sucks to be you and rules to be whoever's skynet killed yours.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#186

At this rate, it's more than FOSS infrastructure -- although that's a canary in the coalmine I especially sympathize with -- it's anonymous Internet access altogether. Because you can put your site behind an auth wall, but these new bots can solve the captchas and imitate real users like never before. Particularly if they're hitting you from residential IPs and with fake user agents like the ones in the article -- or…

For your next X requests you need to process these many tokens. I mean that sounds utopian for sure.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#187
post #177
post #33

It's really surreal to see my project in the preview image like this. That's wild! If you want to try it: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis . So far I've noticed that it seems to actually work. I just deployed it to xeiaso.net as a way to see how it fails in prod for my blog.

Nice work :) One piece of feedback: Could you add some explanation (for humans) what we're supposed to do and what is happening when met by that page? I know there is a loading animation widget thingy, but the first time I saw that page (some weeks ago at the Gnome issue tracker), it was proof-of-work'ing for like 20 seconds, and I wasn't sure what was going on, I initially thought I got blocked or that the captcha f…

> One piece of feedback: Could you add some explanation (for humans) what we're supposed to do and what is happening when met by that page?

Will do! https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/issues/25

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#188
I see this as a temporary problem. A human brain can be trained on way less than the entire corpus of everything humans have ever written. Ultimately, this will apply to LLMs (or whatever succeeds them) too.

There's another aspect to this too: China and DeepSeek. While this was released by a private company, I think there's a not-insigificant chance that it reflects Chinese government policy to "commoditize your complements" [1]. Companies like OPenAI want to hide their secret sauce so it can't be produced. Training an LLM is expensive. If there are high-quality LLMs out there for free you can just download, then this moat completely evaporates.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#189
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just burning their goodwill to the ground AI firms seem to be leading from a position that goodwill is irrelevant: a $100bn pile of capital, like an 800lb gorilla, does what it wants. AI will be incorporated into all products whether you like it or not; it will absorb all data whether you like it or not.

Maxim 1: "Pillage, then burn."

Another Schlock Mercenary fan? Or does this adage have many adherents?

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#190

I know a lot of FOSS people are hostile to AI in general, and this is an immediate problem, but I feel like a better solution for everyone would be for there to be some sort of central repo of this information that AI companies can pull from without externalizing their costs like this.

Are you suggesting that everyone move their projects to a single code forge (GitHub)?

Also, isn't this basically just extortion? "I know you're minding you're own business FOSS maintainer, but move your code to our recommended forge instead so we can stop DDoSing you?"

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