"Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself - the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself."

A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source “tar pit” to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage owners to protect their own content from being scraped or can be deployed “offensively” as a honeypot trap to waste AI companies’ resources.

Registration bypass: https://archive.is/3tEl0

  • @ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    36•3 months ago

    From the description, it sounds like this would only have limited effect and only short lived until guardrails are implemented in crawlers.

    • Flying SquidOPEnglish
      29•3 months ago

      Probably so. It’s always going to be an arms race, just like with malware.

      • SkaveRatEnglish
        10•3 months ago

        I mean… not really. This isn’t even a defence. Any web crawler worth its salt will just stop after a while. And they do so for literally decades already