"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

  • @AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12•3 months ago

    The typical web crawler doesn’t appear to have a lot of logic. It downloads a URL, and if it sees links to other URLs, it downloads those too.

    So it has nothing to do with “AI training” in the usual sense.

      • @HexadecimalSky@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4•3 months ago

        I think the point is it doesn’t specifically target “AI trainers” but web crawlers, which are used by more then just A.I. trainer, for example search engines.

          • @HexadecimalSky@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3•3 months ago

            It affects them, yes, but it doesn’t only affect them. It’s just a poison in the well tactic that can affect them. but because it isn’t specific even more companies will work to “fix it”. Also while it can waste resources, it doesn’t stop A.I. training in most cases or render them incompetent.

            For example if I add rat poison to all the local water ways, it would get rid of the pigeon problem, so it targets pigeons?

              • @HexadecimalSky@lemmy.worldEnglish
                3•3 months ago

                From reading the article it just seems it targets web crawlers, by having a infinitely looping url. How does it target A.I. training webcrawls specifically?

    • jungleEnglish
      4•3 months ago

      It also has nothing to do with real web crawlers. Maybe the first crawlers when the web was a couple million pages were that dumb, but that’s ancient history.