"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
    19·
    3 days ago

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

      • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        4·
        3 days 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
    41·
    3 days 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
        1·
        3 days 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.