this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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159
Anubis - Weighs the soul of incoming HTTP requests using proof-of-work to stop AI crawlers (github.com)
submitted 22 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I just started using this myself, seems pretty great so far!

Clearly doesn't stop all AI crawlers, but a significantly large chunk of them.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

It's a clever solution but I did see one recently that IMO was more elegant for noscript users. I can't remember the name but it would create a dummy link that human users won't touch, but webcrawlers will naturally navigate into, but then generates an infinitely deep tree of super basic HTML to force bots into endlessly trawling a cheap-to-serve portion of your webserver instead of something heavier. Might have even integrated with fail2ban to pick out obvious bots and keep them off your network for good.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

generates an infinitely deep tree

Wouldn't the bot simply limit the depth of it's seek?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

It could be infinitely wide too if they desired. It shouldn't be that hard to do I wouldn't think. I would suspect they limit the time a chain can use though to eventually escape out, though this still protects data because it obfuscates legitimate data that it wants. The goal isn't to trap them forever. It's to keep them from getting anything useful.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

If you remember the project I would be interested to see it!

But I've seen some AI poisoning sink holes before too, a novel concept as well. I have not heard of real world experiences of them yet.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 15 hours ago

I'm assuming they're thinking about this

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.

Which was posted here a while back