this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will "eat just about anything that finds its way inside."

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It's not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an "infinite maze" of static files with no exit links, where they "get stuck" and "thrash around" for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That's likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn.

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[–] Docus@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Does it also trap search engine crawlers? That would be a problem

[–] independantiste@sh.itjust.works 34 points 2 months ago

The big search engine crawlers like googles or Microsoft's should respect your robots.txt file. This trick affects those who don't honor the file and just scrape your website even if you told it not to

[–] Soup@lemmy.world 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I imagine if those obey the robots.txt thing that it’s not a problem.

[–] draughtcyclist@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago

Don't make me tap the sign

[–] ubergeek@lemmy.today 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

If so, it appears to the search engine crawler that you have lots of content to be indexed, so it probably would move your page ranking up.