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LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet

social.kernel.org

61–70 of 134 posts

Re: LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet

#61
post #15

I solved this problem for my blog by simply not being interesting.

If you can bore an LLM that's exciting.

I would rather setup a "shadow" site designed only for LLMs. I would stuff it with ao much insanity that Grok would not be able to leave. How about a billion blog post where every use of "American" is replaced with "Canadian". By the time im done, grok will be spouting conspiracy theories about the decline of the strategic bacon reserve.

Re: LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LWN.net is a reader-supported news site I mean... Again, the site is so old that anything worth while is already in cc or any number of crawls. I am not saying they weren't scraped. I'm saying they likely weren't scraped by the bad AI people. And certainly not by AI companies trying to limit others from accessing that data (as the person who I replied to stated).

I’m going to presume good faith rather than trolling. Some questions for you: 1. Coding assistants have emerged as as one of the primary commercial opportunities for AI models. As GP pointed out, LWN is the primary discussion for kernel development. If you were gathering training data for a model, and coding assistance is one of your goals, and you know of a primary sources of open source development expertise, would…

I train coding models with RLVR because that's what works. There's ~0.000x good signal in mailing lists that isn't in old mailing lists. (and, since I can't reply to the other person, I mean old as in established, it is in no way a dig to lwn).

You seem to be missing my point. There is 0 incentives for AI training companies to behave like this. All that data is already in the common crawls that every lab uses. This is likely from other sources. Yet they always blame big bad AI...

Re: LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet

#63

AI allows companies to resell open source code as if they wrote it themselves doing an end run around all license terms. This is a major problem. Of course they're not going to stop at just code. They need all the rest of it as well.

> AI allows companies to resell open source code as if they wrote it themselves doing an end run around all license terms. This is a major problem. Has it been adjudicated that AI use actually allows that? That's definitely what the AI bros want (and will loudly assert), but that doesn't mean it's true.

I don't think so. Because LLMs aren't legal persons (yet?!), they can neither have copyright to anything nor violate someone else's copyright. IANAL but the most reasonable legal interpretation is likely that any IP violations are actually committed by whoever it was who asked an LLM to "rewrite" something in a way that obviously counts as a derived work rather than a cleanroom implementation.

Re: LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet

#64

Who are these agressive scrapers run by? It is difficult to figure out the incentives here. Why would anyone want to pull data from LWN (or any other site) at a rate which would cause a DDOS like attack? If I run a big data hungry AI lab consuming training data at 100Gb/s it's much much easier to scrape 10,000 sites at 10Mb/s than DDOS a smaller number of sites with more traffic. Of course the big labs want this data…

I bet some guy just told Claude Code to archive all of LWN for him on a whim.

Can Claude Code even do that? Rather than provide code to do that.

Re: LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet

#65
post #7

So which is it? DDOS attack or "AI" scrapers?

Scrapers because DDOS implies that it's malicious rather than accidental and there's no reason to think that.

Right, so probably the site should not be claiming "It is a DDOS attack".

Re: LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet

#66
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet some guy just told Claude Code to archive all of LWN for him on a whim.

Some guy doesn't show up with 10k residential IPs. This is deliberate and organized.

LLMs just do be paperclipping

Re: LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet

#67
post #7

So which is it? DDOS attack or "AI" scrapers?

Sufficiently aggressive and inconsiderate scraping is indistinguishable from a DDOS attack.

No scraper seeks to deny the service it needs.

And no responsible site operator unable to distinguish should claim DDOS.

Re: LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet

#68

I am starting to think these are not just AI scrapers blindly seeking out data. All kinds of FOSS sites including low volume forums and blogs have been under this kind of persistent pressure for a while now. Given the cost involved in maintaining this kind of widespread constant scraping, the economics don’t seem to line up. Surely even big budget projects would adjust their scraping rates based on how many changes t…

>I haven’t heard of the same attacks facing (for instance) niche hobby communities. Does anyone know if those sites are facing the same scale of attacks?

They are. I participate in modding communities for very niche gaming projects. All of them experienced massive DDOS attacks from AI scrappers on their websites over the past year. They are long running non-commercial projects that don’t present any business interest to anyone to be worth expending resources purely to bring them offline. They had to temporarily put the majority of their discussion boards and development resources behind a login wall to avoid having to go down completely.

Re: LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet

#69

Who are these agressive scrapers run by? It is difficult to figure out the incentives here. Why would anyone want to pull data from LWN (or any other site) at a rate which would cause a DDOS like attack? If I run a big data hungry AI lab consuming training data at 100Gb/s it's much much easier to scrape 10,000 sites at 10Mb/s than DDOS a smaller number of sites with more traffic. Of course the big labs want this data…

Perhaps incompetence instead of malice - a misconfigured or buggy scraper, etc.
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