"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

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    133·
    6 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
        51·
        6 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.

        • finley@lemm.eeEnglish
          13·
          6 days ago

          Actually, it does specifically target AI trainers, as it poisons their training data. These webcrawlers are just a means to an end.

          • HexadecimalSky@lemmy.worldEnglish
            52·
            6 days ago

            It affects them, yes, but it doesn’t only affect them. It’s just a poison in the well tactic that can affect them. but because it isn’t specific even more companies will work to “fix it”. Also while it can waste resources, it doesn’t stop A.I. training in most cases or render them incompetent.

            For example if I add rat poison to all the local water ways, it would get rid of the pigeon problem, so it targets pigeons?

            • finley@lemm.eeEnglish
              22·
              6 days ago

              The first part of what you said, contradicts itself, and the second part of what you said is a terrible metaphor. Especially considering that these web crawlers that crawl for AI training data only target that. And this specifically target AI training web crawlers.

              So, it’s more like putting a very specific rat poison in the waterways that is only poisonous to rats.

              It seems like you don’t understand how this works.

              • HexadecimalSky@lemmy.worldEnglish
                31·
                6 days ago

                From reading the article it just seems it targets web crawlers, by having a infinitely looping url. How does it target A.I. training webcrawls specifically?

    • jungle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      6 days ago

      It also has nothing to do with real web crawlers. Maybe the first crawlers when the web was a couple million pages were that dumb, but that’s ancient history.