I solved this problem for my blog by simply not being interesting.
If you can bore an LLM that's exciting.
LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet
61–70 of 134 posts
Re: LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet
#62Earlier 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…
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
#63AI 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.
Re: LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet
#64Who 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.
Re: LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet
#65Re: LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet
#66Re: LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet
#67Re: LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet
#68I 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…
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
#69Who 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…
Re: LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet
#70There is no reason for AI scrappers to use tens of thousands of IPs to scrape one site over and over.
That just sounds like a classic DDOS.