If you are automating it, I don't see why not. Kitboga, a you-tuber kept scam callers in AI call-center loops tying up there resources so they cant use them on unsuspecting victims.[0]

That's a guerilla tactic, similar in warfare, when you steal resources from an enemy, you get stronger and they get weaker, its pretty effective.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDpo_o7dR8c

In 2000s there was some company in Russia selling English courses. It spammed so much, that people were really pissed off. To make long story short, the company disappeared from a public space when Golden Telecom joined the party of retaliatory "spam" calls and make computer to call the company using Golden Telecom modem pool.

So, yeah, you kinda can achieve something in this way, but to make sure you should lease a modem pool for that.

It’s one of the best time investments I’ve ever made. They just don’t call me anymore.

I think they have two lists: the “do not call” list, and the “unprofitable to call” list. You want to be on the latter list.

phone scammers have a very high personel cost, hence why some resort for human traffic.

if everyone picked up the phone and wasted a few seconds, it would be enough to make their whole enterprise worthless. but since most people who would not fail shutdown right away, they have the best ROI of any industry. they don't even pay the call for first seconds.

Is this how low we've sunk - that even below taking a single personal anecdote and generalizing it to everything - now we're taking zero experience and dismissing things based on vibes?

I've seen lots of LLM-slop-lovers doing the same thing. Maybe it's a pattern.

Depending on your goals, this may be a pro or a con. I, personally, would like to see a return of "small web" human-centric communities. If there were tools that include anti-scraping, anti-Google (and other large search crawlers) as well as a small web search index for humans to find these sites, this idea becomes a real possibility.

Many bots cycle through short DHCP leases on LTE wifi devices. One would have to accept blocking all cell phones which I have done for my personal hobby crap but most businesses will not do this. Another big swath of bots come from Amazon EC2 and GoogleCloud which I will also happily block on my hobby crap but most businesses will not.

Some bots are easier to block as they do not use real web clients and are missing some TCP/IP headers making them ultra easy to block. Some also do not spoof user-agent and are easy to block. Some will attempt to access URL's not visible to real humans thus blocking themselves. Many bots can not do HTTP/2.0 so they are also trivial to block. Pretty much anything not using headless Chrome is easy to block.

Seems a clever and fitting name to me. A poison pit would probably smell bad. And at the same time, the theory that this tool would actually cause “illness” (bad training data) in AI is not proven.

It's not all that productive, it's an act of desperation. If you can't stop the enemy, at least you can make their action more costly.

One positive outcome I could see it AI companies becoming more critical of their training data.

If you want an AI bot to crawl your website while you pay for that bandwidth then you wont use the tool.

https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/ai-bots-swarm-library-c...

I'm completely uncertain that the unsophisticated garbage I generated makes any difference, much less "poisons" the LLMs. A fellow can dream, can't he?

1. Simple, cheap, easy-to-detect bots will scrape the poison, and feed links to expensive-to-run browser-based bots that you can't detect in any other way.

2. Once you see a browser visit a bullshit link, you insta-ban it, as you can now see that it is a bot because it has been poisoned with the bullshit data.

My personal preference is using iocaine for this purpose though, in order to protect the entire server as opposed to a single site.

You can use security challenges as a mechanism to identify false positives.

Sure bots can get tons of proxies for cheap, doesn’t mean you can’t block them similar to how SSH Honeypots or Spamhaus SBL work albeit temporarily.

More centralized web ftw.

[1]: in quotes, because I dislike the term, because it’s immaterial whether or not an ugly block of concrete out in the sticks is housing LLM hardware - or good ol’ fashioned colo racks.

We need a Crawler blacklist that can in realtime stream list deltas to centralized list and local dbs can pull changes.

Verified domains can push suspected bot ips, where this engine would run heuristics to see if there is a patters across data sources and issue a temporary block with exponential TTL.

There are many problems to solve here, but as any OSS it will evolve over time if there is enough interest in it.

Costs of running this system will be huge though and corp sponsors may not work but individual sponsors may be incentivized as it’s helps them reduce bandwidth, compute costs related to bot traffic.

Like, what if you actually post something that gains traction, is it going to bankrupt you or something?

If your site exists to share information, then the information gets disseminated, whether via LLM or some browser, it doesn't make a difference to me

And search crawlers/results have been producing snippets that prevent users from clicking to the source for well over a decade.

Edit: it loaded. I don't see how the problem isn't simply solved by an off the shelf solution like cloud flare. In the real world, you wouldn't open up a space/location if you couldn't handle the throughput. Why should online spaces/locations get special treatment?

If you keep getting harrassed by people wearing black hoodies, would it be ethical to start taking countermeasures against all people who wear black hoodies?

My current problem is OpenAI, that scans massively ignoring every limit, 426, 444 and whatever you throw at them, and botnets from East Asia, using one IP per scrap, but thousands of IPs.

Good enough for me.

> More centralized web ftw.

This ain't got anything to do with "centralized web," this kind of epistemological vandalism can't be shunned enough.

It's not just some light bump in traffic. It's a headache that shouldn't need to be dealt with if they would respect ROBOTS.txt. Quite simple really.

This is no different than saying “robbers aren’t causing any problems, you just need to lock your doors, buy and set up sensors on every point of potential ingress, and pay a monthly cost for an alarm system. That’s on you.”

many scraper already know not to follow these, as it's how site used to "cheat" pagerank serving keyword soups

Why are you presenting the latter option as if it were mainstream? It's such a small percentage of use cases that it probably isn't even a rounding error.

People who want to disseminate information also want the credit.

I'd still like to know why you are presenting this false dichotomy. What reason do you have for presenting a use case that has fractions of a percentage as if it were a standard use case? What is your motivation behind this?

Maybe I don't understand the problem as well as I should, and I'm open to hearing what it is you think that I'm missing.

But from my perspective, this is a solution for a non-problem, which in my eyes is a problem itself.

This is psychological projection.

The use case you present is so small it can be ignored as an option, yet you present it as the only other option.

You don't know what that means.

In any case, people who want to disseminate information with credit can do so without standing up a blog (any place that allows posting of comments, such as Reddit, HN, etc).

In the context of this discussion, we're talking about site owners; people who put up a blog.

No. Reading something, learning from it, then writing something similar, is legal; and more importantly, it is moral. There is no violation here. Copyright holders already have plenty of power; they must not be given the power to restrict the output of your brain forever more for merely having read and learnt. Reading and learning is sacred. Just as importantly, it's the entire damn basis of our profession!

If you do not want people to read and learn from your content, do not put it on the web.

Fair use is part of "copyright and licensing laws".

In that case it's a terrible analogy because if you can't get people to agree on the cookies case, what hope do you have to extend it to the case you're trying to apply the analogy to? It's like saying "You wouldn't pirate a movie, why would you pirate a blog post", because most people would pirate movies.

When a crawler aggressively crawls your site, they're permanently depriving you the use of those resources for their intended purpose. Arguably, it looks a lot like conversion.

boo. took all the fun out of it ;)

What it the model then creates a virtual actor that is very close to the real actor?

my comment was about the very human need to be recognized for something created, made, or thought by a person. People are ok with writing blog posts, they're ok with writing software, and they're ok with give it all for free, but they want their name attached and their contribution recognized.

"Likeness" is a separate concept from copyrights

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights

And I specifically addressed that aspect:

>The moral question is more ambiguous, but it's still pretty weak. Most recipes are uncredited, and it's unclear why someone can force everyone to attribute the recipe to them when all they realistically did was tweak the dish a bit. In the example above, I doubt you invented cookies.

The cookies analogy was terrible because recipes are rarely credited, but even ignoring the terrible analogy the "recognition" argument still fails. If you wrote a blog post on how to set up kubernetes (or whatever), then it's fair enough that you get recognized for that specific blog post. If my friend asked me how to set up kubernetes, it wouldn't be cool for me to copy paste your blog post and send it over.

However similar to copyright, the recognition you deserve quickly drops off once it moves beyond that specific work. If I absorbed the knowledge from your blog post, then wrote another guide on setting up kubernetes, perhaps updated for my use case, it's unreasonable to require that you be credited. It might be nice, and often times people do, but it's also unreasonable if you wrote an angry letter demanding that you be credited. You weren't the inventor of kubernetes, and you probably got your knowledge of kubernetes from elsewhere (eg. the docs the creators made), so why should everyone have to credit you in perpetuity?

if humans read my blog posts and then things without credit that would be fine. i like human eyeballs and i like them on my content. that's exactly the purpose of the blog post (_in this particular example_), to get human eyeballs on the content.

Or maybe you're just terrible at writing.

>if humans read my blog posts and then things without credit that would be fine.

I'm not sure how I (or anyone) was supposed to come away with this conclusion when you were writing stuff like:

"i'm ok with giving the recipe for free, i just want my name out there"

"the very human need to be recognized for something created"

"they want their name attached and their contribution recognized".

but, in the spirit of critical reading education, what i meant is: human attention good, machine ingestion bad.

But instead we've got people posting "honey pots" that an LLM will immediately detect and route around.