These companies are performing DDoS attacks and should have the rule book thrown at them.
FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
381–390 of 631 posts
Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#382In case anyone is interested in a tiny bit of sabotage, I am under the impression I managed to 'drown' true information on my microblog by generating contradicting posts with LLaMa (tens of them for each real post) and invisibly linking them, so a human would not click through. You know, flood the zone with s***, Bannon-style ...
Yep, just make sure to add them to your robots.txt file so that only the bad robots are harmed.
Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#383I was also under attack recently [0]. The little Forgejo instance where I host my code (of several open source packages so it needs to be open) was run into the ground and the disk was filled with generated zip archives. I'm not the only one who has suffered the same fate. For me, the attacks subsided (for now) when I banned Alibaba Cloud's IP range. If you are hosting a Forgejo instance, I strongly recommend setting…
"disk was filled with generated zip archives" That's bad software design to generate ZIP files on the fly.
They're deleted by default every 24 hours and that time is configurable. Not useful when you get 60 requests per second though.
Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#384So I'll just float an idea again that always gets rejected here. This is yet another problem that could be solved completely by... Eliminating anonymity by default on the internet. To be clear, you could still have anonymous spaces like Reddit where arbitrary user IDs are used and real identities are discarded. People could opt-in to those spaces. But for most people most of the time, things get better when you can v…
It's not just "downsides", it's completely missing the point of the web.
Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#385To me it sounds like these people are operating websites that don't work. My home internet (80 down, 5 up) connection hosted website handled 20k+ hits from the alibaba ai crawler yesterday without missing a beat. And many thousands more from GPTbot, etc. I'll grant it can be a problem for super-heavy "application" websites where every GET is a serious computation. So I'm not surprised gitlab is having problems. They'…
There's source repository browsers (git/svn) way, way leaner than GitLab that have the same issues. Any repo browser offering a blame view for files can be brought down by those bots' traffic patterns. I have been hosting such repository browsers for 10+ years and it was never an issue until the arrival of these bots.
Indeed. It's really exposing a major downside to running applications in browser context. It never really made sense. These applications really don't want public traffic like actual websites do. They should remain applications and stay off the web. But more likely is that the web will be destroyed to fit the requirements of the applications. Like what cloudflare, etc, and all this anti-bot social hysteria is doing.
Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, alternatively, you know, pay the author for the work they've done
Sure, if you're going to deploy it on your company site, but I think if you're running a personal website and want to throttle LLM crawlers without falsely advertising that you're a furry, you could just go and modify this piece of MIT-licensed software.
Or you could pay for BotStopper and have RPM/DEB packages too.
Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#387I dare to say the inconceivable, you shouldn't have free plans even for the community. This will also push FOSS projects to seek some money to pay for their infrastructures which probably leads to better pay for their maintainers. Nothing should be $$ free unless you already paid with your tax. Same principle -> As long as HN starts to charge every account, I'm happy to pay a small amount per month. This token amount…
Are you saying that Gnome shouldn't offer access to their VCS for free, and all Gnome developers should pay a small sum to be able to access it? FOSS is generally built on the idea that anyone can use the code for anything, if you start to add a price for that, not only do you effectively gate your project from "poor people", but it also kind of erodes some of the core principles behind FOSS.
> all Gnome developers should pay a small sum to be able to access it?
There's access via (e.g.) the git protocol (git://....) and access via http.
These attacks all happen via the latter, since the former is already access-controlled.
Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... but for stuff which people put up thinking it is just going to be publicly visible ... I don't think these business owners really understand. Most normies just think everyone has a Facebook/Instagram account and can't even imagine a world where that is not the case. I agree with you that it is extremely frustrating.
>Most normies just think everyone has a Facebook/Instagram account and can't even imagine a world where that is not the case. The people without a basic internet presence aren't likely to be customers anyway so it's not a huge loss. It's trivial to setup a basic account for any site that doesn't contain any personal data you want to keep hidden, if you aren't willing to do that, you're in a tiny minority.
I don't have a Facebook or Instagram account, but I definitely eat tacos and I was put off when I couldn't see a new taco place's opening hours without an instagram accoutn.
I'm not sure why you think why people who don't have a Facebook account wouldn't eat at restaurants
Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
Capitalism is an unthinking, unfeeling force. The writing is on the wall that AI is coming, and being altruistic about it doesn’t do jack to keep others from the land grab. Their thinking is, might as well join the rush and hope they’re one of the winners. Every one of us sitting on the sidelines will be impacted in some way or the other. So who’re the smart ones, the ones who grab shovels and start digging, or the o…
obviously China is going full forward and better at it, with no "Capitalism" involved
China has been communist-in-name-only since Deng, you're accidentally proving the parent's point instead of refuting it.
Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#390It'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.
Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't this mean the work has to be done by the client AND the server every time a challenge is issued? I think ideally you'd want work that was easy for the server and difficult for the server . And what is to stop being DDoS'd by clients that are challenged but neglect to perform the challenge? Regardless, I think something like this is the way forward if one doesn't want to throw…
> I think ideally you'd want work that was easy for the server and difficult for the server.
That's exactly how it works (easy for server, hard for client). Once the client completed the Proof-of-Work challenge, the server doesn't need to complete the same challenge, it only needs to validate that the results checks out.
Similar to how in Proof-of-Work blockchains where coming up with the block hashes is difficult, but validating them isn't nearly as compute-intensive.
This asymmetric computation requirement is probably the most fundamental property of Proof-of-Work, Wikipedia has more details if you're curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_work
Fun fact: it seems Proof-of-Work was used as a DoS preventing technique before it was used in Bitcoin/blockchains, so seems we've gone full circle :)