"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.

“It’s less like flypaper and more an infinite maze holding a minotaur, except the crawler is the minotaur that cannot get out. 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. 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,” Aaron B, the creator of Nepenthes, told 404 Media.

    • Brumefey@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      15 hours ago

      Just tried and got the expected answer :

      In chess, looking at your opponent’s pieces is not only allowed but essential to playing the game. Observing the placement and movement of your opponent’s pieces helps you plan your strategy and anticipate their moves. However, if you’re referring to situations like secretly peeking at a hidden plan (in correspondence chess, for example) or breaking rules in a specific chess variant, then it could be considered cheating. But in standard chess, observing your opponent’s pieces is part of fair play.

      • Womble@lemmy.worldEnglish
        223·
        1 day ago

        Yeah thats not real, if you ask chat gpt it gives the obvious answer of you have to look at the pieces. Either its shopped or its leaving off previous messages where the user has deliberately conviced it that it is cheating.

          • Womble@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            12 hours ago

            See i understand that one, LLMs dont work with letters they work with tokens which are more like Chinese characters. So even though they display letters to the end users the models themselves dont see them which is why you can get dumb mistakes like that.

            The chess thing is strange though, its not like there is a lack of writing on chess so I do wonder where it got that idea from.

            • Serinus@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              12 hours ago

              There’s an ocean of chess games recorded in chess notation. So it’ll play brilliant moves. They may not apply to this game or be legal moves, but in that other situation they were brilliant!