Comment by rester324

1 day ago

You can implement this yourself, who is stopping you?

Citation needed

  • I use iocaine[0] to generate a tarpit. Yesterday it served ~278k "pages" consisting of ~500MB of gibberish (and that's despite banning most AI scrapers in robots.txt.)

    [0] https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org

    • Can't seem to access this.

      It flashes some text briefly then gives me an 418 TEAPOT response. I wonder if it's because I'm on Linux?

      EDIT: Begrudgingly checked Chrome, and it loads. I guess it doesn't like Firefox?

      5 replies →

    • Unfortunately and you kind of have to count this as the cost of the Internet. You've wasted 500Mb of bandwidth.

      I've had colocation for eight years+. My monthly b/w cost is now around 20-30Gb a month given to scrapers where I was only be using 1-2Gb a month, years prior.

      I pay for premium bandwidth (it's a thing) and only get 2TB of usable data. Do I go offline or let it continue?

      1 reply →

    • i have no idea what this does because the site is rejecting my ordinary firefox browser with "Error code: 418 I'm a teapot". Even from a private browser.

      If I hit it with Chrome, now I can see a site.

      Seems pretty not ready for prime time as a lot of my viewers use Firefox

  • One of the most popular ones is Anubis. It uses a proof of work and can even do poisoning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44378127

    • Anubis is the only tool that claims to have heuristics to identify a bot, but my understanding is that it does this by presenting obnoxious challenges to all users. Not really feasible. Old school approaches like ip blocking or even ASN blocking are obsolete - these crawlers purposely spam from thousands of IPs, and if you block them on a common ASN, they come back a few days later from thousands of unique ASNs. So this is not really a "roll your own" situation, especially if you are running off the shelf software that doesn't have some straightforward means of building in these various approaches of endless page mazes (which I would still have to serve anyway).