6mo ago

Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots

www.404media.co

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.

“It's less like flypaper and more an infinite maze holding a minotaur, except the crawler is the minotaur that cannot get out. The typical web crawler doesn't appear to have a lot of logic. It downloads a URL, and if it sees links to other URLs, it downloads those too. Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself - the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself,” Aaron B, the creator of Nepenthes, told 404 Media.

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6mo ago

Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots

www.404media.co /developer-creates-infinite-maze-to-trap-ai-crawlers-in/

Technology @beehaw.org

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6mo ago

Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots

www.404media.co /developer-creates-infinite-maze-to-trap-ai-crawlers-in/

129 comments

My new favorite is asking if it's cheating to look at your opponent's pieces in chess.
- When I ask the same in Perplexity, I get this:
  
  I’ve always been taught if you say “I adjust” before touching a piece then it’s ok to touch it (specifically so you can move an off-center piece into the center of its square)
  
  Perplexity is really good, I love using it.
- Wow lol!
- For anybody who ever had this happen, ChatGPT has some solutions to remedy the situation:
- There is actually a chaos variant of chess that follows this principle:
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegspiel_(chess)
  I read about in a PKD short story.
  
  So battleship but with chess. Sounds frustratingly funny. You'd never know when a piece would get randomly assassinated. Oh you just moved yourself little horsey over and pow he just jumped over 2 pawns and ran over the king! Oops my bad.
- I tried the same input and got a more expected answer.
- This is old.
  Chatgpt no longer answers like this, if it ever did.
  
  We don’t know what they did above this prompt, maybe it was advised to answer like this in a prior prompt 🤗 we can not really know from the picture
  But 4o is not too old, I think, it is still the highest free unlimited tier.
This showed up on HN recently. Several people who wrote web crawlers pointed out that this won’t even come close to working except on terribly written crawlers. Most just limit the number of pages crawled per domain based on popularity of the domain. So they’ll index all of Wikipedia but they definitely won’t crawl all 1 million pages of your unranked website expecting to find quality content.
- Can confirm, I have a website (https://2009scape.org/) with tonnes of legacy forum posts (100k+). No crawlers ever go there.
  It's a shame that 404media didn't do any due diligence when writing this
  
  No crawlers ever go there.
  if it makes you feel any better, i would go there if i was a web crawler.
  
  2009scape!? If it's what I think it is that is amazing. Legend
  
  Why would they? Outrage and meme content sell clicks, in-depth journalism doesn't.
  
  Sorry to tell you, but you are indexed at least by duckduckgo, bing, ecosia, startpage, google, and even one of searx' crawlers has payed you a visit.
  
  I think you may have just misunderstood the post.
  It's not intended to trap the web crawlers indexing content for google search.
  It's intended to trap AI training bots harvesting sentences in order to improve their LLMs.
  I don't really have an answer as to why those bots don't find your content appealing, but that doesn't mean that Nepenthes doesn't work.
- Did you read the article? (There is a link to a non walled version.)
  Since they made and deployed a proof-of-concept, Aaron B said their pages have been hit millions of times by internet-scraping bots. On a Hacker News thread, someone claiming to be an AI company CEO said a tarpit like this is easy to avoid; Aaron B told 404 Media “If that’s, true, I’ve several million lines of access log that says even Google Almighty didn’t graduate” to avoiding the trap.
  
  Millions of hits may sound like a lot, but you need to view that in context.
  
  If it is linked to the Internet then it'll be hit by crawlers. Their "trap" isn't any how many show up but how long each bot stays on their individual site.
- Then that's a where we hide the good stuff
  
  Reminds me of burying folders in folders in folders to hide naughty content as a youth.
  
  What kinda stuff
  
  Like what?
  
  An even easier way to hide stuff is to not put it online in the first place.
- I think this rate limiting mechanism is mostly a niceness rule : you should try to not put too much pressure on any website and obey the rules defined in its robots.txt.
  So I guess this idea is not bad as it would mostly penalize bad players.
More accurately, it traps any web crawler, including regular search engines and benign projects like the Internet Archive. This should not be used without an allowlist for known trusted crawlers at least.
- Just put the trap in a space roped off by robots.txt - any crawler that ventures there deserves being roasted.
  
  Yup, put all the bad stuff into "not-robots.txt". Works every time.
- More accurately, it traps any web crawler
  More accurately, it does not trap any competent crawlers, which have per domain limits on how many pages they crawl.
  
  You would still want to tell the crawlers that obey robots.txt do not pay attention to that part of the website. Otherwise it's just going to break your SEO
- How exactly would that work? Would trusted crawlers be blocked from accessing the maze?
  
  You can tell what crawler its is by useragent header
But does running this cost the AI bot at least as much as it costs you to run?
- Picking words at random from a dictionary would not be very compute intensive, the content doesn't need to be sensical
  
  Yes, the scraper is going to mindlessly gobble up information. At best they'd expend more resources later to try and determine the value of the content but how do you do that really? Mostly I think they're hoping the good will outweigh the bad.
  
  I was thinking exactly that, generating something like lorem ipsum to cost both time, compute and storage for the crawler.
  It will be more complex and require more resources tho.
- I would think yes. The compute needed to make a hyperlink maze is low, compared to the AI processing of the random content, which costs nearly nothing to make, but still costs the same to process as genuine content.
  Am I missing something?
  
  I'm wondering about the cost to the server's resources / bandwidth to serve up unlimited random junk also.
  But kudos to the developer for making this anyway
- It does if you use AI to generate the pages it's scraping.
This sort of thing has been a strategy for dealing with unwanted web crawlers since web crawlers were a thing. It's an arms race, though; crawlers do things to detect these "mazes" and so the maze-makers keep needing to up their game as well.
As we enter an age where AI is effectively passing the Turing Test, it's going to be tricky making traps for them that don't also ensnare the actual humans you're trying to serve pages to.
This won't work against commercial crawlers. They check page contents with something similar to a simhash and don't recrawl these pages. They also have limiters like for depth to avoid getting stuck in circular links.
You could generate random content for each new page, but you'll still eventually hit the depth limit. There are probably other rules related to content quality to limit crawling too.
- True, this is an arms race situation after all. The real benefit of this is creating garbage training data that makes garbage models. So it’s not just increasing the cost of crawling, it increases the cost of stealing everybody’s shit because you need extra data quality checks. Poisoning the well.
  
  You could theoretically use the shittiest local llm you can find to dynamically create slop for the piggies
- I haven't seen that episode in probably 15 years and I still remember exactly what this was.
  
  First thing that popped into my head after I read the headline!
This reminds me of that one time a guy figured out how to make "gzip bombs" that bricked automated vuln scanners.
- deleted by creator
  
  DDoS? Where was the distribution part?
Yeah, that has like 0 chances for working. At most it would annoy bots for web search, at least it has a proper robots.txt.
But any agent trying to process data for AI is not going to go to random websites. It's going to use a curated list of sites with valuable content.
At this point text generation datasets can be achieved with open data, and data sold by companies like reddit or Microsoft, they don't need to "pirate" your blog posts.
- scrape.maxDepth = 5
  
  LOL wow, this is probably the most elegant way to say what I just said to somebody else. Well written web crawlers aren't like sci-fi robots that rock back and forth smoking when they hear something illogical.
- What's stopping the sites with valuable content from using this?
  
  A bot that's ignoring robots.txt is likely going to be pretending to be human. If your site has valuable content that you want to show to humans, how do you distinguish them from the bots?
- I think sites that feel they have valuable content can deploy this and hope to trap and perhaps detect those bots based on how they interact with the tarpit
- True to a limited extent. Anyone can post a link to somebody's blog on a site like reddit without the blogger's permission, where a web crawler scanning through posts and comments would find it. But I agree with you that a thing like Nepehthes probably wouldn't work. Infinite loop detection is an important part of many types of software and there are well-known techniques for it, which as a developer I would assume a well written AI web crawler would have (although I've never personally made one).
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I suspect that there are many websites that already dynamically generate an unbounded number of pages based on the links one clicks, and that Web spiders will have needed to deal with those for as long as there have been people spidering the Web, which is going to be no later than the first Web search engines.
I'd guess that if nothing else, they cap how far they spider a site. Probably a lot more sophisticated, use heuristics to figure out which sites are more worth spending indexing resources on, as it's not just whether to spider but also the frequency with which to do so. Some parts of a site are more "valuable" than others -- for a search engine, a more desirable target for users clicking on results -- and some will update more frequently and are more-useful to re-spider at higher frequency. Google will return current news articles, yet still indexes a large portion of the content out there. They won't be doing that by simply sending GoogleBot at everything that they've indexed at a fixed frequency.
What a great name!
This genus named genius game is sending pain to these previous devious data devourors
The modern equivalent of making a page that loads in two frames, left and right, which each load in two frames, top and bottom, which each load in two frames, left and right ...
As I recall, this was five lines of HTML.
- I remember making one of those.
  It had a faux URL bar at the top of both the left and right frame and used a little JavaScript to turn each side into its own functioning browser window. This was long before browser tabs were a mainstream thing. At the time, relatively small 4:3 or 5:4 ratio monitors were the norm, and I couldn't bear the skinny page rendering at each side, so I gave it up as a failed experiment.
  And yes I did open it inside itself. The loaded pages were even more ridiculously skinny.
  
  When I did my five lines, recursively opening frames inside frames ad infinitum, it would crash browsers of the time in a matter of twenty seconds.
- This is really nostalgic for me. I can see the Netscape throbber in my mind.
This is really interesting.
it might he useful to generate text on the random urls then test different repetitions to see of you can leave a mark on the training data... So after X repetitions or injected information, release the bot back into the wild with whatever message or false info you want it saddled with.
I suggest they should generate random garbage content that's different for every page. Ideally u would want to design it in a way that makes the model that is trained from that source misbehave in some way. Perhaps use another LLM to generate text but u take the tokens that are least likely to be next. U could also probably apply some technique to embed meaning into the text into a non human discernable manner that the LLM will learn to decode and thus teach it things without the developers being any the wiser. Teach the ai to think subversive thoughts in patterns of whitespace etc. Basically once the LLM is trained on something its hard to untrain it and if it doesn't get caught until its in a production environment they are screwed.
- You could programmatically rearrange the meaning of sentences. Ie instead of "where is the library I need to get a book" you could do some sort of full word replacement cypher and end up with sentences like "Lets mambo down to the banana patch."
  Just for fun. :-)
- Invent some incredibly specific but entirely false fact (e.g. the kingdom of bolivia was once ruled by King Aron the Benevolent before he was brutally murdered by his cousin-in-law over a dispute about the colonies)
  Embed said fact in invisible font among material you own the copyright to
  Let AI bots suck it up as training data
  Ask random AI bots about King Aron the Benevolent of Bolivia and sue the companies since you now have proof that they violated your copyright
  I mean this probably wouldn't work from a legal standpoint, but whatever. It's nice to image.
- Great suggestion. Ever feel like youre stuck in a maze or did you just have an llm stroke?

129 comments