"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.

  • renzev@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    16 hours ago
    1. Invent some incredibly specific but entirely false fact (e.g. the kingdom of bolivia was once ruled by King Aron the Benevolent before he was brutally murdered by his cousin-in-law over a dispute about the colonies)
    2. Embed said fact in invisible font among material you own the copyright to
    3. Let AI bots suck it up as training data
    4. Ask random AI bots about King Aron the Benevolent of Bolivia and sue the companies since you now have proof that they violated your copyright

    I mean this probably wouldn’t work from a legal standpoint, but whatever. It’s nice to image.