this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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I had to block ByteSpider at work because it can't even parse HTML correctly and just hammers the same page and accounts to sometimes 80% of the traffic hitting a customer's site and taking it down.
The big problem with AI scrapers is unlike Google and traditional search engines, they just scrape so aggressively. Even if it's all GETs, they hit years old content that's not cached and use up the majority of the CPU time on the web servers.
Scraping is okay, using up a whole 8 vCPU instance for days to feed AI models is not. They even actively use dozens of IPs to bypass the rate limits too, so theyre basically DDoS'ing whoever they scrape with no fucks given. I've been woken up by the pager way too often due to ByteSpider.
My next step is rewriting all the content with GPT-2 and serving it to bots so their models collapse.
I think a common nginx config is to just redirect malicious bots to some well-cached terrabyte file. I think hetzner hosts one iirc
https://github.com/iamtraction/ZOD
42kB ZIP file which decompresses into 4.5 PB.
wouldn't it be trivial to defend against that with a hash check if the size matches?
though I guess it's possible to create your own that differs