Humanely dealing with humungus crawlers
(flak.tedunangst.com)73 points by freediver 9 hours ago
73 points by freediver 9 hours ago
My view on this is simple:
If you're a bot which will ignore all the licenses I put on that content, then I don't want to you to be able to reach that content.
No, any amount of monetary compensation is not welcome either. I use these licenses as a matter of principle, and my principles are not for sale.
That's all, thanks.
How can you tell a bot will ignore all your content licenses?
I think it’s better viewed through a lens of effort. Implementing systems that try harder to not challenge humans takes more work than just throwing up a catch-all challenge wall.
The author’s goal is admirable: “My primary principle is that I’d rather not annoy real humans more than strictly intended”. However, the primary goal for many people hosting content will be “block bots and allow humans with minimal effort and tuning”.
Really? If I’m an unsophisticated blog not using a CDN, and I get a $1000 bill for bandwidth overage or something, I’m gonna google a solve and slap it on there because I don’t want to pay another $1000 for Big Basilisk. I don’t think that’s emotional response, it’s common sense.
Seems like you've made profoundly questionable hosting or design choices for that to happen. Flat rate web hosting exists, and blogs (especially unsophisticated ones) do not require much bandwidth or processing power.
Misbehaving crawlers are a huge problem but bloggers are among the least affected by them. Something like a wiki or a forum is a better example, as they're in a category of websites where each page visit is almost unavoidably rendered on the fly using multiple expensive SQL queries due to the rapidly mutating nature of their datasets.
Git forges, like the one TFA is discussing, are also fairly expensive, especially as crawlers traverse historical states. When the crawler is poorly implemented they'll get stuck doing this basically forever. Detecting and dealing with git hosts is an absolute must for any web crawler due to this.
>Flat rate web hosting exists, and blogs (especially unsophisticated ones) do not require much bandwidth or processing power.
I actually find this surprisingly difficult to find.
I just want static hosting (like Netlify or Firebase Hosting), but there aren't many hosts that offer that.
There are lots of providers where I can buy a VPS somewhere and be in charge of configuring and patching it, but if I just want to hand someone a set of HTML files and some money in exchange for hosting, not many hosts fit the bill.
Wouldn't it be easier to put the unsophisticated blog behind cloudflare
They don't really have to be. I don't have many mitigations and the AI bots crawl my site and it's fine. The robots.txt is pretty simple too and is really just set up to help the robot not get stuck in loops (I use Mediawiki as the CMS and it has a lot of GET paths that a normal person wouldn't choose). In my case, a machine near my desk hosts everything and it's fine.
I used to say that, but last year it stopped being true for me.
Unfortunately for your proposal, the crawlers for training LLMs don't have the same censorship as the AI chatbots do when communicating with the end user. The censorship of chatbots is either done by means of fine-tuning (a technique which is part of the broader category of 'alignment' processes), or having a separate model (which may or may not be an LLM) filter its output. Both of these are done only at runtime, after the LLM has already been trained - and most of the crawling comes during training.
All that's to say that you can stop some of your website contents being quoted by the chatbots verbatim, but you can't prevent the crawlers using up all your bandwidth in the way you describe. You also can't stop your website contents being rehashed in a conceptual way by the chatbot later. So if I just write something copyrighted or taboo here in this comment, that won't stop an LLM being trained on the comment as a whole, but it might stop the chatbot based on that LLM from quoting it directly.
Everything is moving so quickly with AI that my comment is probably out of date the moment I type it... take it with a grain of salt :)
I made my pages static HTML with no images, used a fast server, and BunnyCDN (see profile domain). Ten thousand hits a day from bots costs a penny or something. When I'm using images, I link to image hosting sites. It might get more challenging if I try to squeeze meme images in between every other paragraph to make my sites more beautiful.
Far as Ted's article, the first thing that popped in my head is that most AI crawlers hitting my sites are in big, datacenter cities: Dallas, Dublin, etc. I wonder if I could easily geo-block those cities or redirect them to pages with more checks built-in. I just haven't looked into that on my CDN's or in general in a long time.
They also usually request files from popular, PHP frameworks and othrr things like that. If you don't use PHP, you could autoban on the first request for a PHP page. Likewise for anything else you don't need.
Of the two, looking for .php is probably lightening quick with low, CPU/RAM utilization in comparison.
The point of a blog is whatever the author would like it to be. It doesn't have to follow a structure or expectations. We just happen to be consuming it.
> Sorry, what's the point of this blog?
Being a blog the way the author dreamed of it.
> I hope people would write a quick abstract/summary in the first few lines and then go on elaborating.
I hope people continue doing what makes them happy. It's their site, they owe nothing to anyone (maybe except hosting / network fees, but that's not my business, either).
> Or at least put that summary at the end, in old-fashioned way.
Or maybe people can spend a couple of minutes to read and understand it, with the MSI (MeatSpaceIntelligence) which comes bundled with all human beings.
It's free, too!
Maybe, maybe .. you get some pleasure in forcing people to read every bit of what you write, just to get what the heck it is. But unfortunately it is the age of AI summaries and short attention spans. Not the times when you read half-foot thick novels end-to-end multiple times. TL;DR!
I write my digital garden and blog for myself. They are just happen to be public. The pleasurable part is putting it out there, not forcing people to read it.
If people prefer to have short attention spans and leave what I put out after 30 seconds, it's their own choice. My blog has minimal analytics (provided by the platform), and digital garden has no analytics whatsoever, so I don't care and get bothered what humans do with my site.
I personally don't use any AI tools whatsoever, and still prefer to read half-foot thick novels end-to-end. Hyperion Cantos (4 x 700 pages) was great. My next target is Foundation by Asimov (7 volumes incl. expansions).
what a just totally bizarre perspective
all of the stuff that's being complained-about is absolute 100% table-stakes stuff that every http server on the public internet has needed to deal with since, man, i dunno, minimum 15 years now?
as a result literally nobody self-hosts their own HTTP content any more, unless they enjoy the challenge in like a problem-solving sense
if you are even self-hosting some kind of captcha system you've already make a mistake, but apparently this guy is not just hosting but building a bespoke one? which is like, my dude, respect, but this is light years off of the beaten path
the author whinges about google not doing their own internal rate limiting in some presumed distributed system, before any node in that system makes any http request over the open internet. that's fair and not doing so is maybe bad user behavior but on the open internet it's the responsibility of the server to protect itself as it needs to, it's not the other way around
everything this dude is yelling about is immediately solved by hosting thru a hosting provider, like everyone else does, and has done, since like 2005
Google isn't mentioned in OP, did we read the same article?
>We’ve already done the work to render the page, and we’re trying to shed load, so why would I want to increase load by generating challenges and verifying responses? It annoys me when I click a seemingly popular blog post and immediately get challenged, when I’m 99.9% certain that somebody else clicked it two seconds before me. Why isn’t it in cache? We must have different objectives in what we’re trying to accomplish. Or who we’re trying to irritate.
+1000 I feel like so much bot detection (and fraud prevention against human actors, too) is so emotionally-driven. Some people hate these things so much, they're willing to cut off their nose to spite their face.