Full title: I hid a link on my website that only bots can see and told them not to follow it. They broke the rules and in 4 days they went 124,414 levels deep into an endless maze. One bot opened 782,580 doors. I thought this was super interesting, this is how the internet is these days. Thought I’d share.

  • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    42 minutes ago

    Is it possible to have the bots recursively give themselves instructions and birth child instances of themselves that do the same thing? Because if it’s ai bots, that could absolutely be maliciously exploited.

  • myyass@lemmy.world
    9·
    5 hours ago

    So what you’re implying is this should be implemented in every website in both follow/not follow just to waste their money?

    [Everyone liked this.]

  • OneOfManyPerfectCats@sh.itjust.works
    6·
    5 hours ago

    Can anyone explain what is happening behind the scenes with the “room creation”?? That sounds intriguing. I understand OP is a bot but, is anything described here an actual way of trapping crawlers? How are the crawlers fooled by any of this?

    • HansGruber@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      1 hour ago

      He placed an invisible link on his website. Only visible by reading the page content (html). Then the bots followed the link. This link lead to a page with 5 links (door) four links are dead and one leads to another page (level) with again 5 links.

      I guess the links and pages are generated on the go. So the bots and crawlers may follow the links forever of they like.

      • Leigh Weigh@lemmy.world
        20·
        10 hours ago

        Post history and seeing the same username every day. Plus they rarely every respond to questions and comments when they post and what they respond with is generic.

        • r0ertel@lemmy.world
          3·
          7 hours ago

          What’s the purpose of doing this as a bot but not declaring the account as a bot account? On other sites, they do it for karma farming, but that doesn’t really apply here, right?

          • cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works
            5·
            5 hours ago

            Probably just another layer of analytics for engagement bait in other spaces. They can also copy top comments and train LLMs and whatever else every bad actor does to every internet comment site now. They are like a slime mold and grow toward any source of nutrition except it’s an n-dimensional maze and the nutrition is influencing public opinion and scamming people.

        • Absurdly Stupid @lemmy.worldEnglish
          13·
          4 hours ago

          If you see the same username every day, that means you are on every day… only a spy would do that.

          Suspected Chinese agent, possibly Russian

        • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
          14·
          9 hours ago

          In other words, you don’t really know - not that there’s anything wrong with that. Opinions and “it’s obvious” are the social media standard for “fact”.

          • Leigh Weigh@lemmy.world
            3·
            9 hours ago

            I prefer to think of it as being observant and investigating but to each their own. OP has been called out on almost every post and never defended themselves. Could be a human who doesn’t check the replies but either way, the behavior is the same.

        • Leigh Weigh@lemmy.world
          8·
          6 hours ago

          lol not even a little. I’m trying to grow my lemmy communities. I have no problem with it being a bot, that’s why I haven’t blocked it. My issue is that it’s not declared as a bot. Several times I’ve found myself asking further questions to just realize, it’s that same guy who posted a “my super cool thing” five minutes ago and I won’t get a response to my question. There’s no way he has a jurrasic park themed turtle sanctuary in addition to the other 50 sweet things in his house/yard/town/

    • Leigh Weigh@lemmy.world
      16·
      11 hours ago

      Yeah I have OP listed as “repost bot” so if I see something cool I can go check somewhere else for the info.

        • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          9 hours ago

          You can find the original post on Reddit, somebody has already linked the original post down the thread. This is typical of this user and a few others like sanitation who have become notorious for using Reddit repost bots many times with errors in the repost like not having all of the image or not having any of the post body.

          It’s very annoying.

  • IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works
    29·
    14 hours ago

    You know, I wonder if the AI agents are willing to open random zip files they find on websites, and I’m further curious if they’re smart enough to avoid a zip bomb.

    • Beangut@lemmy.world
      1·
      24 minutes ago

      You can serve zip bombs as web pages since most crawlers support gzip encoding.

      And yes it’s very effective ;)

    • perviouslyiner@lemmy.world
      19·
      13 hours ago

      Can follow JWZ for practical experience on this kind of thing - apparently it is getting so bad that even opening a connection to deliver the zip bombs is getting infeasible now.

    • Psythik@lemmy.world
      11·
      9 hours ago

      Where are you getting your porn from, 'cause between ID-checking roadblocks and the fact that no can seem to make a decent search engine anymore, I’ve never had a more difficult time trying to find good porn. Please, share with me your secrets (and no, I am never going to give my ID to a porn site!)

        • Psythik@lemmy.world
          11·
          7 hours ago

          Isn’t Yandex a Russian search engine? I meant a porntube site. That way I can create an account and have a recommendation algorithm.

            • Psythik@lemmy.world
              21·
              7 hours ago

              Have you ever tried to watch porn without an account before? It’s like watching YouTube without one. It’s the Wild West, and every video sucks. That’s the problem I’m having. Nobody makes a good porn site with a good search function anymore.