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Creepy Crawlies

people.kernel.org

211–220 of 693 posts

Re: Creepy Crawlies

#211

I've spent the last few days adding traps to one of my websites, ironically using LLMs of course, and I've been having quite a lot of fun doing it. Instead of the proof-of-work system of Anubis, I've gone down the iocaine route but implemented it in my application itself, as it's built in Elixir and causing problems for scrapers is really fun when it takes almost no server resources. Currently I trick bad scrapers in…

You can't tease us with that and not share any information! ;-)

Re: Creepy Crawlies

#212

> because apparently what we have to offer is worth spending a ton of cycles to calculate the Anubis challenge. This statement holds the core misapprehension behind Anubis. It’s not a ton of cycles. There is no difficulty setting that would be inconvenient for bots but usable for humans on mobile devices. I noticed the other day that lists.ffmpeg.org had moved to Anubis difficulty level 6, which takes ~180sec for my…

My iPad Pro M2 takes around 30 seconds to solve it in Safari, while my Mac Studio solves it in about 3 seconds using 449% logical CPUs. It really makes no sense. Interesting how much slower it is than native - could it be protections against things such as crypto mining?

Re: Creepy Crawlies

#214
I also run a public cgit instance and get over 1M hits every day, although my pet projects are nowhere near the size or impact of kernel. I had to block (via nginx conf) cgit endpoints for diffs, blame, snapshots and historical commits, because nothing else works. Now they return 402 (payment required). I consider this my total defeat and it's killing me inside, but it is what it is.

Re: Creepy Crawlies

#215

I've spent the last few days adding traps to one of my websites, ironically using LLMs of course, and I've been having quite a lot of fun doing it. Instead of the proof-of-work system of Anubis, I've gone down the iocaine route but implemented it in my application itself, as it's built in Elixir and causing problems for scrapers is really fun when it takes almost no server resources. Currently I trick bad scrapers in…

I hate to ask but what's a "sexy toasters."

Re: Creepy Crawlies

#216
post #139

I've seen this too. I think it's a few bad actors really. Because nobody serious about indexing content will do what these crawlers are doing.. They are consume lots of content that is unoriginal or duplicate or duplicate with minor modifications. Not sure how to block, but maybe a little bit of law enforcement could dramatically reduce the number of TVs being used a proxies.

I run a website with 10k unique pages. If I leave the gates open, Meta hits it 200.000 times per day. Every day. What are you paying developers $500k for Mark?

200k req/day = 2.3 req/s

That's bad for static content.

Try adding search, with pagination and 16 filters that can toggled on off. And 1000 tags, give each page 5.

Re: Creepy Crawlies

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but that doesn't change anything. You have a large pool of IPs, each of which only needs to expend a handful of extra milliseconds of work to get unlimited access to the protected resource. Even if you had to solve a L6 challenge for every request it's faster than the total RTT time of most servers. In other words not a meaningful barrier. And L6 is already a level which severely interferes with human usage of a…

Some of the asymmetry might be regained if anubis had thousands of variations of PoW algorithms, each different enough that they must be solved independently. I wonder if AI might be able to come up with new PoW algorithms in a nightly CI job so every day is a different puzzle...

...That sounds like entropy? As in, the thing computers are bad at (truly random numbers) and /dev/urandom in your kernel already spits out an approximation of?

Re: Creepy Crawlies

#218
post #122

It seems clear to me we are moving towards a world where you will have to perform device attestation to access the internet. The spam/abuse is too great and accelerating.

What prevents people from obtaining or buying such devices and automating them? Using TVs as proxies is just one example of that. People will be willing to give their ID cards away too, if you pay them or beat them enough.

Re: Creepy Crawlies

#219
How feasible would it be to only offer a binary git (partial) download and move the html rendering to the client? It would still be a lot of requests, but less work for those servers. Not that I like SPA’s, but they could be useful here.
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