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Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload

social.treehouse.systems

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Re: Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload

#2
going on a bit of a tangent here - some discussion there seems to be imply that AI bots mostly use IPv4s, which makes sense to me given that they are probably bots hosted by some cloud. Whereas IPv6 may be more organic traffic from e.g. mobile users (not in this case probably)... which made me think if at some point IPv6 may at some point win against IPv4 just because its more organic traffic (i.e. not from big tech cloud), leading to pages blocking IPv4? Just speculation on my side

Re: Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload

#3
While we're dealing with the same issue at work, I sometimes still wonder exactly who these scrapers are. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and others are normally fairly well behaved (Minus Anthropic attempting to hide behind a browser-for-hire company). Mostly you can get IP range and user-agents for the large players, while it problems mostly stem from bots pretending to be Chrome.

Our largest offenders seems to be mostly limited to South-East Asia, so probably mostly Chinese AI projects, but that's speculation. I also don't recall ever seeing Grok IP ranges or a specific Grok UA, but that doesn't mean that they're hiding, perhaps they're just not interested.

Re: Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload

#4
There are definitely patterns you can use against the scrapers. This maintainer just didn't have time for it, which is understandable.

We direct scraper traffic to a bot-specific server using Cloudflare's load balancer, slowly analyzing traffic and adding conditions one at a time. No accidental scraper DDoS in a long time.

Most scrapers are relatively honest in some way shape or form.

Re: Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload

#5
post #2

going on a bit of a tangent here - some discussion there seems to be imply that AI bots mostly use IPv4s, which makes sense to me given that they are probably bots hosted by some cloud. Whereas IPv6 may be more organic traffic from e.g. mobile users (not in this case probably)... which made me think if at some point IPv6 may at some point win against IPv4 just because its more organic traffic (i.e. not from big tech…

This is weird, every VPS I've rented in the last 8 years had IPv6, and some didn't even had IPv4.

Re: Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload

#6
post #2

going on a bit of a tangent here - some discussion there seems to be imply that AI bots mostly use IPv4s, which makes sense to me given that they are probably bots hosted by some cloud. Whereas IPv6 may be more organic traffic from e.g. mobile users (not in this case probably)... which made me think if at some point IPv6 may at some point win against IPv4 just because its more organic traffic (i.e. not from big tech…

The hardest-to-mitigate bot traffic tends to come from residential proxies, and most residential connections are still v4-only.

However, it is also easy to get large numbers of v6 addresses cheaply.

Re: Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload

#7
The year is 2026, somehow peoples basic web apps are not able to keep up with scrapers. Scrapers are not new. My side load is like .01 even with 10x the traffic of last year. It's called "serving static content", "caching" and many other things that are not new concepts.

Then you've got good old cloudflare which is free to use

Re: Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload

#9
post #3

While we're dealing with the same issue at work, I sometimes still wonder exactly who these scrapers are. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and others are normally fairly well behaved (Minus Anthropic attempting to hide behind a browser-for-hire company). Mostly you can get IP range and user-agents for the large players, while it problems mostly stem from bots pretending to be Chrome. Our largest offenders seems to be mostly…

Most of the nonsense comes through botnets/residential proxies, so it's very hard to say.

Re: Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload

#10
post #3

While we're dealing with the same issue at work, I sometimes still wonder exactly who these scrapers are. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and others are normally fairly well behaved (Minus Anthropic attempting to hide behind a browser-for-hire company). Mostly you can get IP range and user-agents for the large players, while it problems mostly stem from bots pretending to be Chrome. Our largest offenders seems to be mostly…

Well, some websites claimed China is behind it, which could make sense (I would not know either way). At the same time, though, I kind of doubt your carte blanche here for all those companies. Why would you think none of them are responsible for the AI slop spam?

> Our largest offenders seems to be mostly limited to South-East Asia, so probably mostly Chinese AI projects, but that's speculation

Ok. So you also don't know. Well, I don't know either, but I don't make a speculation by claiming x, y, and z companies to be exempt. In my book they are all responsible.

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