Creepy Crawlies

Tavis Ormandy called this, about Anubis, almost exactly a year ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962529

It never really cohered as a solution. High-powered scrapers are better equipped to handle proof-of-work challenges than end users. Proof of work makes sense for a password hash, where any one guess at a password provides zero marginal utility. But every request from a scraper is productive to the scraper.

I maintain a formally popular gaming website, and it used to have hundreds of legitimate requests per second. The load would be especially high during popular event times. So, it’s always been running on a dedicated server.

It also has an “online users” counter, which attempted to count real user sessions of unauthenticated user which still maintained a session, which lets them comment, or modify certain filter and display options. It never counted the Google bot.

Over the last few years this counter went from 100-200 users online to thousands. I have been very hands-off with it for many years, doing minor upgrades and backups. However, the site also has gotten quite slow, these sessions were obviously impacting it. So, I finally investigated these crawlers, and yes, it turns out it’s an insane amount of traffic that is entirely artificial, the site has just a handful of real users, and thousands of these crawling sessions that actually try to do everything they can, click every button. It doesn’t help that sort and search were implemented using GET links.

I fixed the counter to exclude the crawlers, but I have a bit of a dilemma. I don’t want to stop the bots from updating their knowledge based on all the content.

The best solution I could find is the new CloudFlare feature where they might charge the crawlers for every request, or otherwise block them. I think that’s a fantastic idea for the internet, at large. I signed up for the beta access, but haven’t heard from them again. I do think it’s unfortunate that this requires CloudFlare and the middleman.

Overall, it seems like the LLM are really straining the internet economy, the openness of it. Email spam used to be the worst, but the organized trillionaire labs sucking up the entire internet is going to break something if we don’t preempt them better.

It’s too bad the copyright and public internet systems are not acting quick enough. And I think there is no reason to act like this race really has to be at such a breakneck speed.

High Anubis difficulty is annoying the hell out of me for several sites. And it's starting to not block LLM bots anymore?

> 33% are now solving the math and getting through to the main site — because apparently what we have to offer is worth spending a ton of cycles to calculate the Anubis challenge.

Side note: why are shallow clones evil? I always thought they were cheaper, but I guess that’s really just for my disk space. (since the server has to compute what blobs to give you instead of just “everything”?)

Hm, interesting - how will it look the actual solution for such problems in the future. I suppose the issue will continue to grow.

First idea - there should be some cost for sending traffic somewhere. And the server owner also should receive pay - not only the internet provider.

So, in with this idea, the server owner can potentially increase the amount of computing power to satisfy all requests.

Those crawlers must be generic. Domain specific ones can be extremely efficient.

Good developers write custom solutions for big sites (determined based on sitemap URLs size).

Have you played with sitemaps?

I wonder if one solution here could be to turn up Anubis difficulty if the first page hit is not one of the obvious entry-points to cgit. It could even have a little hint that says something to the effect of “go visit the home page if this is taking too long”. (Better not to ban them entirely, in case people really did click on some random link e.g. in a news story or mailing list message).

Distributed scrapers are going to generally try and hit their assigned list of pages; it’s a bigger waste of time if they have to go off to visit other pages first to get the cookie challenge.

Given the nature of git, wouldn't all that HTML be highly cacheable? I get that's not free either, but it's got to be a lot less intensive than having cgit generate it every single time.

> So, you'd think that something that pretends to be “Artificial Intelligence” would use the most efficient way of using our data for training purposes, right? Clone the repos, walk every commit. Done.

If repos like this were 10%+ of what they crawled, having a special case for clone-able repos would be smart, but if you're crawling everything, you're not going to do an efficiency tweak for each special case that has a more parse-able option.

This is bad enough that I'm going to stop serving cgit. I've been doing cvsweb, then subversion, then cgit over my home server for many many years and for the first time ever this is annoying my own bw usage.

It's ridiculous also how you ban an IP then 1 second later another one picks up from where the first one left on.

from what I see there are 2 solutions:

1) ban TV-proxy-as-a-service - straight up go to every representative there is and start pushing and lobbying and everything to stop spammers from distributing over non-computer devices, especially legally

2) make old commits more expensive to access than new ones. Legit users are not going to access those much, so they can pay the time. I assume diverse (unpredictable?) difficulty can also make spam pulling harder

Put a CDN in front and let them absorb the load? Seriously, this is static content, which is so cheap to serve it should be free.

WordPress powered a huge number of websites. Yet the crawlers all go straight for the HTML of those sites rather than the more efficient and structured JSON API which all WordPress sites have.

If these crawlers are so smart, why aren't they following the rel="alternate" which is provided explicitly for them?

They're the exception, not the rule. They get crawled like any other site, but happen to host git repositories. It's not obvious that these are targeted crawls and they likely may just end up in crawling queues a lot generally

Maybe you could have a system that heuristicially detects when an crawler is making the request and then feeds them a modified page, itself generated from an LLM, that injects vulnerabilities and bad code and discussion and such.

Just serve the raw commit and render on frontend. I really don't get why they are complaining, just be performant

I've been noticing page views in the past several months with a much wider span of origin on my Blogger stats. Before I would get a few from several countries, but now I am getting views from tiny countries and obscure or outdated browsers and operating systems, which leads me to think scrapers could be using VPN services in various countries along with header anonymizers that mask the device that they are using.

Extensions like ModHeader, BrowserMask do this: https://github.com/apify/crawlee-python

https://github.com/mthcht/Masquerade-Spoofer

Great for AI scrapers, bad for hosters and everyone else.

> Why is git.kernel.org “interesting” to crawlers

Interesting to crawlers is not a narrow scope. We have the same problem on a B2B car wash site.

i wonder what they're all up to. i imagine some are scraping datasets for pre-training, others are probably real-time scrapers looking for security bugs, even more still are agents working on coding tasks and looking at the kernel. also interesting to think about solutions: does everything need to be optimized now for weird access patterns that proliferated ai creates? do the ais need to have behavior trained in to be better netizens? is this the end of anonymous browsing and the beginning of an era where one has to attach an identity to all requests? or the end of community hosted free information services more broadly?

How expensive would AI access be if every user paid their fair share instead of shoving it on the people doing the actual work?

couldn't you have anubis on a dynamic difficulty? ie if a ip requests more than 1k pages per day +1 the difficulty ?

> But no, let's in fact choose the stupidest possible way of doing it — by rendering everything as HTML commit by commit and then parsing it.

I feel like I'm at work.

We had some web crawler using Selenium to make queries and scrape the data instead of just downloading the whole file.

Every day it seems like we have some people that know just enough to be dangerous creating things like that. And then of course it's our fault that things are slow, or we won't give them infinite system resources, etc

But why don't they just git clone?

Off-topic, but anyone with which he did the plots?

It feels inevitable that many systems will have to go to a login/trusted ip source type system. Its just not feasible to continue to operate with 99% of your traffic being fake.

> Training an LLM on content produced by the LLM gives it the equivalent of a digital prion disease

Is it foolish of me to have expected more from a blog post on kernel.org?