Is there any evidence or hints that these actually work? It seems pretty reasonable that any scraper would already have mitigations for things like this as a function of just being on the internet.
Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit
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Re: Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit
#92I dunno... it feels like the same approach as those people who tell you gleeful stories of how they kept a phone spammer on a call for 45 minutes: "That'll teach 'em, ha ha!" Do these types of techniques really work? I’m not convinced. Also, inserting hidden or misleading links is specifically a no-no for Google Search [0], who have this to say: We detect policy-violating practices both through automated systems and,…
Re: Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit
#93Re: Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit
#94Why not simply blacklist or rate limit those bot IP’s ?
Re: Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit
#95Re: Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit
#96Re: Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit
#97Every time I released an update, and new crack would appear. For the next six months I worked on improving the anti-copying code until I stumbled across an article by a coder in the same boat as me.
He realised he was now playing a game with some other coders where he make the copyprotection better, but the cracker would then have fun cracking it. It was a game of whack-a-mole.
I removed the copy protection, as he did, and got back to my primary role of serving good software to my customers.
I feel like trying to prevent AI bots, or any bots, from crawling a public web service, is a similar game of whack-a-mole, but one where you may also end up damaging your service.
Re: Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit
#98Re: Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit
#99Why do this though? It's like if someone was trying to "trap" search crawlers back in the early 2000s. Seems counterproductive
search crawlers used to bring people TO your site llm boots are used to keep people OUT of your site, because knowledge is indexed and distributed by corporations.
If your site exists to share information, then the information gets disseminated, whether via LLM or some browser, it doesn't make a difference to me
Re: Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit
#100I dunno... it feels like the same approach as those people who tell you gleeful stories of how they kept a phone spammer on a call for 45 minutes: "That'll teach 'em, ha ha!" Do these types of techniques really work? I’m not convinced. Also, inserting hidden or misleading links is specifically a no-no for Google Search [0], who have this to say: We detect policy-violating practices both through automated systems and,…
Depending on your goals, this may be a pro or a con. I, personally, would like to see a return of "small web" human-centric communities. If there were tools that include anti-scraping, anti-Google (and other large search crawlers) as well as a small web search index for humans to find these sites, this idea becomes a real possibility.