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Comments (81)

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  mrweasel
  While we're dealing with the same issue at work, I sometimes still wonder exactly who these scrapers are. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and others are normally fairly well behaved (Minus Anthropic attempting to hide behind a browser-for-hire company). Mostly you can get IP range and user-agents for the large players, while it problems mostly stem from bots pretending to be Chrome.Our largest offenders seems to be mostly limited to South-East Asia, so probably mostly Chinese AI projects, but that's speculation. I also don't recall ever seeing Grok IP ranges or a specific Grok UA, but that doesn't mean that they're hiding, perhaps they're just not interested.
• arjie
  I like lesswrong's approach to this. You get 4xx if you scrape that site but greaterwrong.com serves some kind of static site that is scrape friendly. Seems fine to me.
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  littlecranky67
  It is time for micropayments integrated in the browser. Pay 5 cents to access each bug report. Not fun, it shouldn't be like this, but better than not having a bugtracker at all.
• FranOntanaya
  After a decade and half we had to restrict our public side and reorganize our old TED content because scrappers were really hungry for assorted captioned videos. If you have anything of value for training you get eaten alive if you stick out, it's like wearing short pants in the summer tundra.It's going to change a lot the internet we knew, unless somehow we managed to agree on a common high quality dataset repository.
• capitainenemo
  Hedgewars had to lock down its bugzilla and repo too, for the exact same reason. So far the really simple method used (basic auth with the creds posted on the main site) seems to have resisted the scrapers. Presumably if they are too stupid to scrape correctly they are also too stupid to incorporate a trivial auth.
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  ComputerPerson
  There are definitely patterns you can use against the scrapers. This maintainer just didn't have time for it, which is understandable.We direct scraper traffic to a bot-specific server using Cloudflare's load balancer, slowly analyzing traffic and adding conditions one at a time. No accidental scraper DDoS in a long time.Most scrapers are relatively honest in some way shape or form.
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  eYrKEC2
  I don't really understand why there is resistance to in-browser Anubis-style gating using crypto mining for public sites like this.You mine crypto and my free service remains cost-neutral. Yes, that transfers some of the cost to you, but it is marginal.You want to bang on my servers with the fury of a thousand madmen, then I'll scale up the servers and you can pay the marginal cost of your access.Or micropayments, of course, but hard to get normal users to sign up for micropayments. Micropayments could of course be the way to bypass the crypto mining gate.
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  vova_hn2
  Are we assuming that this is the companies themselves scraping data from training or is this "agents" acting on behalf of users? Nowadays every major chat UI (ChatGPT, Claude etc) has a "tool" that allows LLM to load web pages, so it must generate some traffic.
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  rufasterisco
  Enough with playing around the issue. The way out of this mess is not to protect with tech that works but with principles and laws.This is not a tech problem. This is about what should or should not be legal.Nor it’s a question of having time to implement solution X or Y.If someone attacks you yes, you should have better security but you also need to have legal recourse, or it will never stop.Ddos is already illegal.I am not a lawyer so don’t ask me for exact resources, which vary by country anyway, but stop treating scrapers as an inescapable force of nature.
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  jpcom
  What are they scraping the gentoo bugzilla for? I'm confused. Unless you're actively using Gentoo why would this be a resource? Very confusing. Also you'd think we'd have LLM BitTorrent by now, where if they want to scrape something we get a DHT hash for the content and share it with one another, rather than melt servers with the millionth request of the day.
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  pmdr
  There's a reddit thread from 9 years ago with people complaining the site blocking crawlers and thus not being indexed by search engines. So I'm not sure what they consider "overload." At this point they should dump the db on thepiratebay.
• maelito
  Indexers should pay for each request.Maybe Taler could help ?
• Gander5739
  And people complain about cloudflare/anubis/etc. Unfortunately, it's looking like this is the alternative.
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  c-fe
  going on a bit of a tangent here - some discussion there seems to be imply that AI bots mostly use IPv4s, which makes sense to me given that they are probably bots hosted by some cloud. Whereas IPv6 may be more organic traffic from e.g. mobile users (not in this case probably)... which made me think if at some point IPv6 may at some point win against IPv4 just because its more organic traffic (i.e. not from big tech cloud), leading to pages blocking IPv4? Just speculation on my side
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  jiffygist
  So where are bugs reported now?
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  rvz
  Just put the website behind an x402 gate [0] (yes it uses stablecoins) requiring payment if a bot wants to access the content which acts like a Captcha and detect them if they are on direct data center IP or are using residential proxies.Stablecoins have a great use-case and you get paid for bots to access the site with the humans living in peace without the site getting botted.Job done.[0] https://stevekrouse.com/x402
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  ece
  Every website that wants to, can just charge for dumps. Anubis or even Cloudflare can handle the rest I think.
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  shevy-java
  AI skynet is winning. It is stealing time from humans, thus forcing down their activity, as can be seen here.A headline would be great if those AI companies would close down. I hold them all responsible for this.
• nirbendavid
  [flagged]
• draw_down
  [dead]
• ltbarcly3
  Corrected title: "Gentoo bugzilla closed because the guy running it, who says it is 'unusable anyway', saw a lot of traffic from different IP addresses with no clear pattern and accuses AI"
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  calvinmorrison
  The year is 2026, somehow peoples basic web apps are not able to keep up with scrapers. Scrapers are not new. My side load is like .01 even with 10x the traffic of last year. It's called "serving static content", "caching" and many other things that are not new concepts.Then you've got good old cloudflare which is free to use