this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt (arstechnica.com)
submitted 10 months ago by pelespirit@sh.itjust.works to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will "eat just about anything that finds its way inside."

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It's not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an "infinite maze" of static files with no exit links, where they "get stuck" and "thrash around" for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That's likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn.

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[–] Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I hope it's effective.

[–] cm0002@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

It might be initially, but they'll figure out a way around it soon enough.

Remember those articles about "poisoning" images? Didn't get very far on that either

[–] ubergeek@lemmy.today 1 points 10 months ago

The poisoned images work very well. We just haven't hit the problem yet, because a) not many people are poisoning their images yet and b) training data sets were cut off at 2021, before poison pills were created.

But, the easy way to get around this is to respect web standards, like robots.txt

[–] Traister101@lemmy.today 1 points 10 months ago

The way to get around it is respecting robots.txt lol

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's not. If it was, every search engine out there would be belly up at the first nested link.

Google/Bing just consume their own crawling traffic. You don't want to NOT show up in search queries right?

[–] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago

It's unclear how much damage tarpits or other AI attacks can ultimately do. Last May, Laxmi Korada, Microsoft's director of partner technology, published a report detailing how leading AI companies were coping with poisoning, one of the earliest AI defense tactics deployed. He noted that all companies have developed poisoning countermeasures, while OpenAI "has been quite vigilant" and excels at detecting the "first signs of data poisoning attempts."

Despite these efforts, he concluded that data poisoning was "a serious threat to machine learning models." And in 2025, tarpitting represents a new threat, potentially increasing the costs of fresh data at a moment when AI companies are heavily investing and competing to innovate quickly while rarely turning significant profits.

"A link to a Nepenthes location from your site will flood out valid URLs within your site's domain name, making it unlikely the crawler will access real content," a Nepenthes explainer reads.