"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

  • 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?