"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.

  • patrick@lemmy.bestiver.seEnglish
    1483·
    1 day ago

    This showed up on HN recently. Several people who wrote web crawlers pointed out that this won’t even come close to working except on terribly written crawlers. Most just limit the number of pages crawled per domain based on popularity of the domain. So they’ll index all of Wikipedia but they definitely won’t crawl all 1 million pages of your unranked website expecting to find quality content.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      49·
      17 hours ago

      Did you read the article? (There is a link to a non walled version.)

      Since they made and deployed a proof-of-concept, Aaron B said their pages have been hit millions of times by internet-scraping bots. On a Hacker News thread, someone claiming to be an AI company CEO said a tarpit like this is easy to avoid; Aaron B told 404 Media “If that’s, true, I’ve several million lines of access log that says even Google Almighty didn’t graduate” to avoiding the trap.

      • realharo@lemm.eeEnglish
        152·
        13 hours ago

        Millions of hits may sound like a lot, but you need to view that in context.

          • Warl0k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
            7·
            12 hours ago

            The modern internet. Millions of hits is very normal - one of my domains is just 30 year old ASCII art of a penguin, and it gets 2-3 million a month from bots/crawlers (nearly all of them trying common exploits). The idea that the google spider would be notably negatively impacted by this is kinda naive. It could fall fully into the tarpit and it probably wouldn’t even get flagged as an abnormal resource allocation. The difference in power between desktop and enterprise equipment is at this point almost inexpressible.

            • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
              3·
              5 hours ago

              People think of hacking like a thief with a lockpick. It’s oftentimes more like someone methodically checking every door in the neighborhood for any that are unlocked.

      • ShadowWalker@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        15 hours ago

        If it is linked to the Internet then it’ll be hit by crawlers. Their “trap” isn’t any how many show up but how long each bot stays on their individual site.

    • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.mlEnglish
      801·
      1 day ago

      Can confirm, I have a website (https://2009scape.org/) with tonnes of legacy forum posts (100k+). No crawlers ever go there.

      It’s a shame that 404media didn’t do any due diligence when writing this

      • affiliate@lemmy.worldEnglish
        411·
        1 day ago

        No crawlers ever go there.

        if it makes you feel any better, i would go there if i was a web crawler.

      • Kornblumenratte@feddit.orgEnglish
        21·
        13 hours ago

        Sorry to tell you, but you are indexed at least by duckduckgo, bing, ecosia, startpage, google, and even one of searx’ crawlers has payed you a visit.

      • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        11·
        15 hours ago

        I think you may have just misunderstood the post.

        It’s not intended to trap the web crawlers indexing content for google search.

        It’s intended to trap AI training bots harvesting sentences in order to improve their LLMs.

        I don’t really have an answer as to why those bots don’t find your content appealing, but that doesn’t mean that Nepenthes doesn’t work.

    • Bogasse@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      17 hours ago

      I think this rate limiting mechanism is mostly a niceness rule : you should try to not put too much pressure on any website and obey the rules defined in its robots.txt.

      So I guess this idea is not bad as it would mostly penalize bad players.