How Cloudflare uses generative AI to slow down, confuse, and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and other bots that don’t respect “no crawl” directives.
Especially since the solution I cooked up for my site works just fine and took a lot less work. This is simply to identify the incoming requests from these damn bots – which is not difficult, since they ignore all directives and sanity and try to slam your site with like 200+ requests per second, that makes 'em easy to spot – and simply IP ban them. This is considerably simpler, and doesn’t require an entire nuclear plant powered AI to combat the opposition’s nuclear plant powered AI.
In fact, anybody who doesn’t exhibit a sane crawl rate gets blocked from my site automatically. For a while, most of them were coming from Russian IP address zones for some reason. These days Amazon is the worst offender, I guess their Rufus AI or whatever the fuck it is tries to pester other retail sites to “learn” about products rather than sticking to its own domain.
Fuck 'em. Route those motherfuckers right to /dev/null.
and try to slam your site with like 200+ requests per second
Your solution would do nothing to stop the crawlers that are operating 10ish rps. There’s ones out there operating at a mere 2rps but when multiple companies are doing it at the same time 24x7x365 it adds up.
Some incredibly talented people have been battling this since last year and your solution has been tried multiple times. It’s not effective in all instances and can require a LOT of manual intervention and SysAdmin time.
It’s worked alright for me. Your mileage may vary.
If someone is scraping my site at a low crawl rate I honestly don’t care so long as it doesn’t impact my performance for everyone else. If I hosted anything that was not just public knowledge or copy regurgitated verbatim from the bumf provided by the vendors of the brands I sell, I might oppose to it ideologically. But I don’t. So I don’t.
If parallel crawling from multiple organizations legitimately becomes a concern for us I will have to get more creative. But thus far it hasn’t, and honestly just wholesale blocking Amazon from our shit instantly solved 90% of the problem.
the only problem with that solution being applied to generic websites is schools and institutions can have many legitimate users from one IP address and many sites don’t want a chance to accidentally block one.
It’s what I’ve been saying about technology for the past decade or two … we’ve hit an upper limit to our technological development … that limit is on individual human greed where small groups of people or massively wealthy people hinder or delay any further development because they’re always trying to find ways to make money off it, prevent others from making money off it, monopolize an area or section of society … capitalism is literally our world’s bottleneck and it’s being choked off by an oddly shaped gold bar at this point.
this is some fucking stupid situation, we somewhat got a faster internet and these bots messing each other are hugging the bandwidth.
Especially since the solution I cooked up for my site works just fine and took a lot less work. This is simply to identify the incoming requests from these damn bots – which is not difficult, since they ignore all directives and sanity and try to slam your site with like 200+ requests per second, that makes 'em easy to spot – and simply IP ban them. This is considerably simpler, and doesn’t require an entire nuclear plant powered AI to combat the opposition’s nuclear plant powered AI.
In fact, anybody who doesn’t exhibit a sane crawl rate gets blocked from my site automatically. For a while, most of them were coming from Russian IP address zones for some reason. These days Amazon is the worst offender, I guess their Rufus AI or whatever the fuck it is tries to pester other retail sites to “learn” about products rather than sticking to its own domain.
Fuck 'em. Route those motherfuckers right to /dev/null.
Your solution would do nothing to stop the crawlers that are operating 10ish rps. There’s ones out there operating at a mere 2rps but when multiple companies are doing it at the same time 24x7x365 it adds up.
Some incredibly talented people have been battling this since last year and your solution has been tried multiple times. It’s not effective in all instances and can require a LOT of manual intervention and SysAdmin time.
https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/
It’s worked alright for me. Your mileage may vary.
If someone is scraping my site at a low crawl rate I honestly don’t care so long as it doesn’t impact my performance for everyone else. If I hosted anything that was not just public knowledge or copy regurgitated verbatim from the bumf provided by the vendors of the brands I sell, I might oppose to it ideologically. But I don’t. So I don’t.
If parallel crawling from multiple organizations legitimately becomes a concern for us I will have to get more creative. But thus far it hasn’t, and honestly just wholesale blocking Amazon from our shit instantly solved 90% of the problem.
Yep. After you ban all the easy to spot ones you’re still left with far too many hard to ID bots. At least if your site is popular and large.
Geez, that’s a lot of requests!
It sure is. Needless to say, I noticed it happening.
the only problem with that solution being applied to generic websites is schools and institutions can have many legitimate users from one IP address and many sites don’t want a chance to accidentally block one.
This is fair in those applications. I only run an ecommerce web site, though, so that doesn’t come into play.
It’s what I’ve been saying about technology for the past decade or two … we’ve hit an upper limit to our technological development … that limit is on individual human greed where small groups of people or massively wealthy people hinder or delay any further development because they’re always trying to find ways to make money off it, prevent others from making money off it, monopolize an area or section of society … capitalism is literally our world’s bottleneck and it’s being choked off by an oddly shaped gold bar at this point.