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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

#491

Post by dpc_01234 »

xena wrote: post #365
noveltyaccount wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the PoW make money via crypto mining? Or is it just to waste the caller's CPU cycles? If you could monetize the PoW then you could re-challenge at an interval tuned so that the caller pays for their usage.

It's to waste CPU cycles. I don't want to touch cryptocurrency with a 20 foot pole. I realize I'm leaving money on the table by doing this, but I don't want to alienate the kinds of communities I want to protect.

By doing PoW as a side effect of something you need to do anyway for other reason, you actually make mining less profitable for other miners, which is helping to eliminate waste.

This is an aspect that a lot of PoW haters miss. While PoW is a waste, there are long term economic incentives to minimize it to either being a side-effect of something actually useful, or using energy that would go to waste anyway, making it's overall effect gravitate toward neutral.

Unfortunately such a second order effects are hard to explain to most people.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#492

Post by pmontra »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #253

Banning Edge to deal with the problem is probably not ideal. What I am thinking about may even be less idea. For people actively working on these projects how about puptting the git server on a private net with VPN or SSH access. Use a seperate read only static git server to the net.

I was also thinking about VPNs but the static copy still has to serve a lot of traffic so I don't know if that's an economically viable solution. Furthermore it creates a market for VPN credentials, but that's another issue. At least I expect that a bot with sold or stolen credential will be easier to discover.

Anyway, why not git clone the project and parse it locally instead of scraping the web pages? I understand that scraping works on every kind of content but given the scale git clone and periodical git fetch could save money even to the scrapers.

Finally, all of this reminds me about Peter Watt's Maelstrom, when viruses infested the Internet so much (at about this time in history) that nobody was using it anymore [1]

[1] https://rifters.com/maelstrom/maelstrom_master.htm

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#493

Post by boris »

dbaio wrote: post #373

This is how we handled this in the FreeBSD infrastructure. https://blog.sysopscafe.com/posts/ai-crawlers-hammering-git-... It has been running this way for a month, and the workload is fine. I hope it continues this way.

Thanks for sharing. If I understood correctly, you have rate-limiter specific urls (those with commit ids) that are infrequently requested by users but frequently by bots. Which means, provided the bots continue trying to request them, any user request will most likely end up being denies. In this case a simpler solution might be to just block such urls outright. The only advantage of your more complex solution that I can see is that if the bots stop requesting these urls, they will again become accessible to the normal users. Or am I missing something?

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#494

Post by kittikitti »

rglullis wrote: post #152
kittikitti wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"some form of social proof." Sounds like sanctioned racism.

Oh, stop. I'm talking about social proof as in "You are an student of the city university, so you get an account at the library", "Julie from the book reading group wanted an account at our Bookwyrm server, so I made an account for her" or even "Unnamed customer who signed up for Cingular Wireless and was given an authorization code to access Level 2 support directly".

This is being naive about the kinds of gatekeeping and social proof occurring today. I fully believe you didn't intend to mention social proof to be racist, but with people like Zuck and Elon removing DEI, being racist is social proof you belong in their elite club.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#495

Post by devit »

Well, looking at the SourceHut code, it's written in Python and handles git by spawning a "git" process.

In other words, it was written with no consideration for performance at all.

A competent engineer would use Rust or C++ with an in-process git library, perhaps rewrite part of the git library or git storage system if necessary for high performance, and would design a fast storage system with SSDs, and rate-limit slow storage access if there has to be slow storage.

That's the actual problem, LLMs are seemingly just adding a bit of load that is exposing the extremely amateurish design of their software, unsuitable for being exposed on the public Internet.

Anyway, they can work around the problem by restricting their systems to logged in users (and restricting registration if necessary), and using mirroring their content to well-implemented external services like GitHub or GitLab and redirecting the users there.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#496

Post by Steltek »

ferguess_k wrote: post #67
ericholscher wrote: post #3

Yep -- our story here: https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse... (quoted in the OP) -- everyone I know has a similar story who is running large internet infrastructure -- this post does a great job of rounding a bunch of them up in 1 place. I called it when I wrote it, they are just burning their goodwill to the ground. I will note that one of the main startups in the space worked with us direct…

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

Tarpit instead? Trickle out a dead end response (no links) at bytes-per-second speeds until the bot times out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarpit_(networking)

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#497

Post by hmmm-i-wonder »

devit wrote: post #495

Well, looking at the SourceHut code, it's written in Python and handles git by spawning a "git" process. In other words, it was written with no consideration for performance at all. A competent engineer would use Rust or C++ with an in-process git library, perhaps rewrite part of the git library or git storage system if necessary for high performance, and would design a fast storage system with SSDs, and rate-limit s…

>In other words, it was written with no consideration for performance at all.

This is a bold assumption to make on such little data other than "your opinion".

Developing in python is not a negative, and depending on the people, the scope of the product and the intended use is completely acceptable. The balance of "it performs what its needed to do in an acceptable window of performance while providing x,y,z benefits" is almost a certain discussion the company and its developers have had.

What it never tried to solve was scaling to LLM and crawler abuse. Claiming that they have made no performance considerations because they can't scale to handle a use case they never supported is just idiotic.

>That's the actual problem, LLMs are seemingly just adding a bit of load that is exposing the extremely amateurish design of their software.

"Just adding a bit of load" != 75%+ of calls. You can't be discussing this in good faith and make simplistic reductions like this. Either you are trolling or naively blaming the victims without any rational thought or knowledge.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#498

Post by DrillShopper »

UncleMeat wrote: post #30
pjc50 wrote: 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.

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…

> The entire vision is to remake the entire world into one where the owners of these companies own everything and are completely unconstrained.

I agree with you in the case of AI companies, but the desire to own everything an bee completely unconstrained is the dream of every large corporation.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#499

Post by nottorp »

rhaps0dy wrote: post #371
Vegenoid wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, why even use bitcoin, or crypto at all. Just use a crypto that is better suited to micropayments.

Proof-of-work crypto is interesting here because it is fungible with computation, so these solutions that charge computation to users are literally equivalent to crypto. It's a solution that already has adoption, does not require everyone to sign up with a centralized service, and does not require everyone to pay money (they can pay with small amounts of computation instead) so it remains accessible to ~everyone.

Yes, sites could use a bot protection service that runs captcha breaking AIs on the viewer's browser. Said bot protection service could then break captchas for forum spammers to make real money.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#500

Post by ATechGuy »

ericholscher wrote: post #3

Yep -- our story here: https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse... (quoted in the OP) -- everyone I know has a similar story who is running large internet infrastructure -- this post does a great job of rounding a bunch of them up in 1 place. I called it when I wrote it, they are just burning their goodwill to the ground. I will note that one of the main startups in the space worked with us direct…

Wondering if used tried stopping such bots with Captcha?
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