- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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Put something in robots.txt that isn’t supposed to be hit and is hard to hit by non-robots. Log and ban all IPs that hit it.
Imperfect, but can’t think of a better solution.
Good old honeytrap. I’m not sure, but I think that it’s doable.
Have a honeytrap page somewhere in your website. Make sure that legit users won’t access it. Disallow crawling the honeytrap page through robots.txt.
Then if some crawler still accesses it, you could record+ban it as you said… or you could be even nastier and let it do so. Fill the honeytrap page with poison - nonsensical text that would look like something that humans would write.
I think I used to do something similar with email spam traps. Not sure if it’s still around but basically you could help build NaCL lists by posting an email address on your website somewhere that was visible in the source code but not visible to normal users, like in a div that was way on the left side of the screen.
Anyway, spammers that do regular expression searches for email addresses would email it and get their IPs added to naughty lists.
I’d love to see something similar with robots.
Yup, it’s the same approach as email spam traps. Except the naughty list, but… holy fuck a shareable bot IP list is an amazing addition, it would increase the damage to those web crawling businesses.
but with all of the cloud resources now, you can switch through IP addresses without any trouble. hell, you could just browse by IP6 and not even worry with how cheap those are!
Yeah, that throws a monkey wrench into the idea. That’s a shame, because “either respect robots.txt or you’re denied access to a lot of websites!” is appealing.
That’s when Google’s browser DRM thing starts sounding like a good idea 😭
Even better. Build a WordPress plugin to do this.
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For banning: I’m not sure but I don’t think so. It seems to me that prefetching behaviour is dictated by a page linking another, to avoid any issue all that the site owner needs to do is to not prefetch links for the honeytrap.
For poisoning: I’m fairly certain that it doesn’t. At most you’d prefetch a page full of rubbish.
“Help, my website no longer shows up in Google!”
Yeah, this is a pretty classic honeypot method. Basically make something available but inaccessible to the normal user. Then you know anyone who accesses it is not a normal user.
I’ve even seen this done with Steam achievements before; There was a hidden game achievement which was only available via hacking. So anyone who used hacks immediately outed themselves with a rare achievement that was visible on their profile.
That’s a bit annoying as it means you can’t 100% the game as there will always be one achievement you can’t get.
perhaps not every game is meant to be 100% completed
There are tools that just flag you as having gotten an achievement on Steam, you don’t even have to have the game open to do it. I’d hardly call that ‘hacking’.
Better yet, point the crawler to a massive text file of almost but not quite grammatically correct garbage to poison the model. Something it will recognize as language and internalize, but severely degrade the quality of its output.
Maybe one of the lorem ipsum generators could help.
a bad-bot .htaccess trap.
robots.txt is purely textual; you can’t run JavaScript or log anything. Plus, one who doesn’t intend to follow robots.txt wouldn’t query it.
If it doesn’t get queried that’s the fault of the webscraper. You don’t need JS built into the robots.txt file either. Just add some line like:
here-there-be-dragons.htmlAny client that hits that page (and maybe doesn’t pass a captcha check) gets banned. Or even better, they get a long stream of nonsense.
Nice idea! Better use
/dev/urandomthrough, as that is non blocking. See here.That was really interesting. I always used urandom by practice and wondered what the difference was.
I wonder if Nginx would just load random into memory until the kernel OOM kills it.
I actually love the data-poisoning approach. I think that sort of strategy is going to be an unfortunately necessary part of the future of the web.
You’re second point is a good one, but you absolutely can log the IP which requested robots.txt. That’s just a standard part of any http server ever, no JavaScript needed.
You’d probably have to go out of your way to avoid logging this. I’ve always seen such logs enabled by default when setting up web servers.
People not intending to follow it is the real reason not to bother, but it’s trivial to track who downloaded the file and then hit something they were asked not to.
Like, 10 minutes work to do right. You don’t need js to do it at all.
As unscrupulous AI companies crawl for more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.
Honestly it seems like in all aspects of society the social contract is being ignored these days, that’s why things seem so much worse now.
It’s abuse, plain and simple.
Governments could do something about it, if they weren’t overwhelmed by bullshit from bullshit generators instead and lead by people driven by their personal wealth.
these days
When, at any point in history, have people acknowledged that there was no social change or disruption and everyone was happy?
Well the trump era has shown that ignoring social contracts and straight up crime are only met with profit and slavish devotion from a huge community of dipshits. So. Y’know.
Only if you’re already rich or in the right social circles though. Everyone else gets fined/jail time of course.
Meh maybe. I know plenty of people who get away with all kinds of crap without money or connections.
The open and free web is long dead.
just thinking about robots.txt as a working solution to people that literally broker in people’s entire digital lives for hundreds of billions of dollars is so … quaint.
It’s up there with Do-Not-Track.
Completely pointless because it’s not enforced
Do-Not-Track, AKA, “I’ve made my browser fingerprint more unique for you, please sell my data”
I bet at least one site I’ve visited in my lifetime has enforced it
you’re jaded. me, too. but you’re jaded.
i prefer “antiqued” but yes
I would be shocked if any big corpo actually gave a shit about it, AI or no AI.
if exists("/robots.txt"): no it fucking doesn'tRobots.txt is in theory meant to be there so that web crawlers don’t waste their time traversing a website in an inefficient way. It’s there to help, not hinder them. There is a social contract being broken here and in the long term it will have a negative impact on the web.
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Yeah I always found it surprising that everyone just agreed to follow a text file on a website on how to act. It’s one of the worst thought out/significant issues with browsing still out there from the beginning pretty much.
Alternative title: Capitalism doesn’t care about morals and contracts. It wants to make more money.
Exactly. Capitalism spits in the face of the concept of a social contract, especially if companies themselves didn’t write it.
Capitalism, at least, in a lassie-faire marketplace, operates on a social contract, fiat money is an example of this. The market decides, the people decide. Are there ways to amass a certain amount of money to make people turn blind eyes? For sure, but all systems have their ways to amass power, no matter what
I’d say that historical evidence directly contradicts your thesis. Were it factual, times of minimal regulation would be times of universal prosperity. Instead, they are the time of robber-barons, company scrip that must be spent in company stores, workers being massacred by hired thugs, and extremely disparate distribution of wealth.
No. Laissez-faire capitalism has only ever consistently benefitted the already wealthy and sociopaths happy to ignore social contact for their own benefit.
You said “a social contract”. Capitalism operates on one. “The social contract” as you presumably intend to use it here is different. Yes, capitalism allows those with money to generate money, but a disproportionate distribution of wealth is not violation of a social contract. I’m not arguing for deregulation, FAR from it, but the social contract is there. If a corporation is doing something too unpopular then people don’t work for them and they cease to exist.
If a corporation is doing something too unpopular then people don’t work for them and they cease to exist.
Unfortunately, this is not generally the case. In the US, for example, the corporation merely engages in legalized bribery to ensure that people are dependent upon it (ex. limiting healthcare access, erosion of social safety nets) and don’t have a choice but to work for them or die. Disproportionate distribution of wealth may not by itself be a violation of social contact but if gives the wealthy extreme leverage to use in coercing those who are not wealthy and further eroding protections against bad actors. This has been shown historically to be a self-reinforcing cycle that requires that the wealthy be forced to stop.
Yes, regulations should be in place, but the “legalized bribery” isn’t forcing people, it’s just easier to stick with the status quo than change it. They aren’t forced to die, it’s just a lot of work to not. The social contract is there, it’s just one we don’t like
Capitalism is a concept, it can’t care if it wanted and it even can’t want to begin with. It’s the humans. You will find greedy, immoral ones in every system and they will make it miserable for everyone else.
Capitalism is the widelly accepted self-serving justification of those people for their acts.
The real problem is in the “widelly accepted” part: a sociopath killing an old lady and justifying it because “she looked funny at me” wouldn’t be “widelly accepted” and Society would react in a suitable way, but if said sociopath scammed the old lady’s pension fund because (and this is a typical justification in Investment Banking) “the opportunity was there and if I didn’t do it somebody else would’ve, so better be me and get the profit”, it’s deemed “acceptable” and Society does not react in a suitable way.
Mind you, Society (as in, most people) might actually want to react in a suitable way, but the structures in our society are such that the Official Power Of Force in our countries is controlled by a handful of people who got there with crafty marketing and backroom plays, and those deem it “acceptable”.
People will always find justification to be asholes. Capitalism tried to harvest that energy and unleashed it’s full potential, with rather devastating consequences.
Sure, but think-structures matter. We could have a system that doesn’t reward psychopathic business choices (as much), while still improving our lives bit by bit. If the system helps a bit with making the right choices, that would matter a lot.
That’s basically what I wrote, (free) market economy especially in combination with credit based capitalism gives those people a perfect combination of a system to thrive in. This seems to result in very fast progress and immense wealth, which is not distributed very equally. Than again, I prefer Besos and Zuckerberg as CEOs rather than politicians or warlords. Dudes with big Egos and Ambitions need something productive to work on.
It’s deemed “acceptable”? A sociopath scamming an old lady’s pension is basically the “John Wick’s dog” moment that leads to the insane death-filled warpath in recent movie The Beekeeper.
This is the kind of edgelord take that routinely expects worse than the worst of society with no proof to their claims.
This is the kind of shit I saw from the inside in Investment Banking before and after the 2008 Crash.
None of those assholes ever gets prison time for the various ways in which they abuse markets and even insider info for swindeling amongst other Pension Funds, so de facto the Society we have with the power structures it has, accepts it.
Most every other social contract has been violated already. If they don’t ignore robots.txt, what is left to violate?? Hmm??
It’s almost as if leaving things to social contracts vs regulating them is bad for the layperson… 🤔
Nah fuck it. The market will regulate itself! Tax is theft and I don’t want that raise or I’ll get in a higher tax bracket and make less!
This can actually be an issue for poor people, not because of tax brackets but because of income-based assistance cutoffs. If $1/hr raise throws you above those cutoffs, that extra $160 could cost you $500 in food assistance, $5-$10/day for school lunch, or get you kicked out of government subsidied housing.
Yet another form of persecution that the poor actually suffer and the rich pretend to.
And then the companies hit the “trust thermocline”, customers leave them in droves and companies wonder how this could’ve happened.
I got it was sarcasm, but it’s always good to add a /s just in case
Yea, because authoritarianism is well known to be sooooo good for the layperson.
Ah yes, equal protection under the law… the true hallmark of an authoritarian regime.
Fiction can be fun!
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We need laws mandating respect of
robots.txt. This is what happens when you don’t codify stuffIt’s a bad solution to a problem anyway. If we are going to legally mandate a solution I want to take the opportunity to come up with an actually better fix than the hacky solution that is robots.txt
AI companies will probably get a free pass to ignore robots.txt even if it were enforced by law. That’s what they’re trying to do with copyright and it looks likely that they’ll get away with it.
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The battle cry of conservatives everywhere: It’s too hard!
Except if it involves oppressing minorities and women. Then it’s a moral imperative worth all the time and money you can shovel at it regardless of whether the desired outcome is realistic or not.
Seriously, could the party of “small government” get out of my business, please?
Sure as long as the party of law and order respects law. And order.
I just wish the push and pull of politics didn’t have to be played as a zero sum game. I wish someone could take the initiative and just…
I think both parties in America sing pretty loud about “law and order.” I haven’t heard that cry particularly loudly from either side over the other. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone who claims to be a Democrat saying the end goal is “small government” but I have heard it from Republican voices.
Honestly, I would really prefer if we were in a system that enabled more parties, so we didn’t have “parties” that did such contradictory things as the current ones…
The GOP has historically been the party of law and order. Hence why they implied that blue lives matter more than black lives.
thatsthejoke.png
Just like how one party impeached a president of the other for obstruction and abuse of power, and the other impeached a president for checks notes lying about a blowjob.
Turning that into a law is ridiculous - you really can’t consider that more than advisory unless you enforce it with technical means. For example, maybe put it behind a login or captcha if you want only humans to see it
Are you aware of what “unlisted” means?
Yes, and there’s also no law against calling an unlisted phone number
Also we already had this battle with robots.txt. In the beginning, search engines wouldn’t honor it either because they wanted the competitive advantage of more info, and websites trusted it too much and tried to wall off too much info that way.
There were complaints, bad pr, lawsuits, call for a law
It’s no longer the Wild West:
- search engines are mature and generally honor robots.txt
- websites use rate limiting to conserve resources and user logins to fence off data there’s a reason to fence off
- truce: neither side is as greedy
- there is no such law nor is that reasonable
There’s also no law against visiting an unlisted webpage? What?
Why? What would you like to achieve and how would that help?
I hope not, laws tend to get outdated real fast. Who knows robots.txt might not even be used in the future and it just there adding space because of law reasons.
You can describe the law in a similar way to a specification, and you can make it as broad as needed. Something like the file name shouldn’t ever come up as an issue.
The law can be broad with allowances to define specifics by decree, executive order or the equivalent.
robots.txt is a 30 year old standard. If we can write common sense laws around things like email and VoIP, we can do it for web standards too.
robots.txt has been an unofficial standard for 30 years and its augmented with sitemap.xml to help index uncrawlable pages, and Schema.org to expose contents for Semantic Web. I’m not stating it shouldn’t not be a law, but to suggest changing norms as a reason is a pretty weak counterargument, man.
We don’t need new laws we just need enforcement of existing laws. It is already illegal to copy copyrighted content, it’s just that the AI companies do it anyway and no one does anything about it.
Enforcing respect for robots.txt doesn’t matter because the AI companies are already breaking the law.
I think the issue is that existing laws don’t clearly draw a line that AI can cross. New laws may very well be necessary if you want any chance at enforcement.
And without a law that defines documents like robots.txt as binding, enforcing respect for it isn’t “unnecessary”, it is impossible.
I see no logic in complaining about lack of enforcement while actively opposing the ability to meaningfully enforce.
Copyright law in general needs changing though that’s the real problem. I don’t see the advantage of legally mandating that a hacky workaround solution becomes a legally mandated requirement.
Especially because there are many many legitimate reasons to ignore robots.txt including it being misconfigured or it just been set up for search engines when your bot isn’t a search engine crawler.
All my scrapping scripts go to shit…please no, I need automation to live…
They didn’t violate the social contact, they disrupted it.
True innovation. So brave.
TIL that robots.txt is a thing
what is it?
robots.txt is a file available in a standard location on web servers (example.com/robots.txt) which set guidelines for how scrapers should behave.
That can range from saying “don’t bother indexing the login page” to “Googlebot go away”.
IT’s also in the first paragraph of the article.
Robots.txt is a file that is is accessible as part of an http request. It’s a backend configuration file that sets rules for what automatically running web crawlers are allowed. It can set both who is and who isn’t allowed. Google is usually the most widely allowed domain for bots just because their crawler is how they find websites for search results. But it’s basically the honor system. You could write a scraper today that goes to websites that it is being told it doesn’t have permission to view this page, ignore it, and still get the information
I do not think it is even part of the HTTP protocol I think it’s just a pseudo add-on. It’s barely even a protocol it’s basically just a page that bots can look at with no really pre-agreed syntax.
If you want to make a bot that doesn’t respect robots.txt you don’t even need to do anything complicated, you just need to not include the requirement to look at the page. It’s not enforceable at all.
I explicitly have my robots.txt set to block out AI crawlers, but I don’t know if anyone else will observe the protocol. They should have tools I can submit a sitemap.xml against to know if i’ve been parsed. Until they bother to address this, I can only assume their intent is hostile and if anyone is serious about building a honeypot and exposing the tooling for us to deploy at large, my options are limited.
The funny (in an “wtf” not “haha” sense) thing is, individuals such as security researchers have been charged under digital trespassing laws for stuff like accessing publicly available ststems and changing a number in the URL in order to get access to data that normally wouldn’t, even after doing responsible disclosure.
Meanwhile, companies completely ignore the standard mentions to say “you are not allowed to scape this data” and then use OUR content/data to build up THEIR datasets, including AI etc.
That’s not a “violation of a social contract” in my book, that’s violating the terms of service for the site and essentially infringement on copyright etc.
No consequences for them though. Shit is fucked.
Remember Aaron Swartz
Corporations are people except when it comes to liability. Compare the consequences of stealing several thousand dollars from someone by fraud vs. stealing several thousand dollars from someone by fraud as an LLC.
Just thought of a nasty hack the browser makers (or hackers) could use to scrape unlisted sites - by surreptitiously logging user browser history for a crawl list
Perhaps some web extensions already do this and phone home about it.
While there are some extensions that do this, last I saw Google didn’t use Chrome for populating Search:
https://blogs.perficient.com/2017/03/15/does-google-use-chrome-to-discover-new-urls-for-crawling/
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Strong “the constitution is a piece of paper” energy right there
What social contract? When sites regularly have a
robots.txtthat says “only Google may crawl”, and are effectively helping enforce a monolopy, that’s not a social contract I’d ever agree to.I had a one-eared rabbit. He was a monolopy.
Sounds like a Pal name lol
Only if its model is a Lopunny missing an ear
I was thinking of a short lil bunny wearing a top hat and monocle with one ear sticking out of the center of the top hat but that works too
When sites regularly have a robots.txt that says “only Google may crawl”
Is that actually true?
If so, why would they do that?
No laws to govern so they can do anything they want. Blame boomer politicians not the companies.
¿Por qué no los dos?
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No Idea why you’re getting downvotes, in my opinion it was very eloquently said
Why not blame the companies ? After all they are the ones that are doing it, not the boomer politicians.
And in the long term they are the ones that risk to be “punished”, just imagine people getting tired of this shit and starting to block them at a firewall level…
I think that good behavior is implicitly mandated even if there’s nobody to punish you if you don’t.
Lol
This is a very interesting read. It is very rarely people on the internet agree to follow 1 thing without being forced
Loads of crawlers don’t follow it, i’m not quite sure why AI companies not following it is anything special. Really it’s just to stop Google indexing random internal pages that mess with your SEO.
It barely even works for all search providers.
The Internet Archive does not make a useful villain and it doesn’t have money, anyway. There’s no reason to fight that battle and it’s harder to win.
