Mastodawn

Evert-J█ ██⭕██Apr 26, 2025

glad we're at the stage of our cyberpunk hell-timeline that we have corporate botnets DDoSing the free software communities that they rely on, leading to an arms race between the biggest companies in the world and a virtual anime person developing a proof-of-work proxy with an anime girl mascot that's now deployed by the united nations

Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken

I guess you have all heard about the growing problem of AI companies trying to aggressively collect whatever data they can get their hands on to train their models. This has caused an explosive surge in web crawlers relentlessly hitting servers big and small. But who runs these crawlers? Turns out — it could be you!

Jan Wildeboer's Blog

ive seen a few people complain that this will increase power usage and therefore cause global warming or whatever. not to worry - the fediverse is already much more inefficient than any competent pow checker. in the process of replying to me complaining about it, you've used more power than you did the one time you sat through the challenge page. sorrgy

princess pancake

@mia I mean, multiply by the number of page visitors and number of visits and stuff

@natty well
multiply by the number of replies i got on my psot

tempest Apr 27, 2025

@mia as if proof of work didn't originate as a spam prevention feature before it got rolled into cryptocurrency

the key difference being that there's not some runaway incentive to "out compete" other participants in the system, so spam prevention won't see the work required escalate forever in a ridiculous speculative arms race

Oliver Geer Apr 27, 2025

@mia I guess people hear "proof-of-work" and think of Bitcoin mining. I guess Bitcoin uses a lot more energy than the Fediverse or Anubis, comparing typical usage by the same number of people, right? Definitely with its current usage in scams and memecoins more than ordinary usage of decentralised finance, the power:utility ratio would be higher IMO.

The ideal situation would be that the crawlers respected robots.txt and this wasn't needed. But of course...

aismallard Apr 20, 2025

@mia i hate capitalism i hate capitalism i hate capitalism i ha[message truncated]

aismallard Apr 20, 2025

@mia very minor nitpick: I’m of the opinion that web scraping is like fishing. fundamentally it’s fine and can provide needed services that there aren’t other ways of doing (particularly many forms of archiving), but that due to this annoying as fuck awful race-to-the-bottom bullshit it’s like overfishing and the horrible ecological consequences thereof

Though really, with the recent focus on FOSS and other independent projects which ultimately feed the wider tech ecosystem, it’s more like fishing companies seeking out fish nurseries and breeding grounds to destroy them, harvesting a few extra fish and other resources at an unacceptable, obvious long-term cost

@aismallard i totally agree

martenson Apr 25, 2025

@aismallard common grounds fishing is a problem we haven't solved for millennia @mia

Lilith Ashley Nyx Arson

@mia they say truth is stranger than fiction

yeah

Rachel Apr 20, 2025

@mia I love the future

elly Apr 20, 2025

@mia The fact that someone who worked in AI industry wrote a tool to combat AI scrapers is possibly one of TOP 10 Anime redemption arcs

Benjamin Sonntag-King Apr 21, 2025

@elly @mia That said, one of the sad facts is that this anime page makes your computer... compute some hard stuff to prove you are not a bot.

This means that, to prevent energy intensive robots of IA from scraping your website, we are making other people use more energy than needed to surf our websites...

The energy consumption of computers is therefore increased by a lot, protected against bots or not...

@benjamin
This truly is the darkest timeline
@elly @mia

Vincent Sparks 🔜 Furlingame Apr 26, 2025

@elly @mia Works* in AI industry

https://xeiaso.net/notes/2025/anubis-works/

> I would really love to not have to work in generative AI anymore because the doublethink is starting to wear at my soul.

Anubis works

Xe Iaso's personal website.

verified_transgender

@mia think my neighbors could hear me guffaw about this

edmeme Apr 21, 2025

What is the foot icon doing in my linux desktop? If my girlfriend thinks I'm into that kinda thing she's gonna be mighty upset

muxelplexer Apr 22, 2025

@mia my non-tech friends are missing out on one of the best thriller-dramas of this decade i swear

josh g.Apr 22, 2025

@mia
W. H. A. T.
@kirch

2xfo Apr 22, 2025

@mia
That one commenter in Gnome Gitlab is SO CLOSE to understanding he should pay money if he wants things to look a specific way 😅

Martin's pipe dreams Apr 23, 2025

@SadMonk great article

SadMonk Apr 23, 2025

@pipe_dreams now, we're just waiting for this Bartmoss guy to break the Internet?

@mia I can't even access the websites

@dusk sorry to hear that

jra Apr 24, 2025

@mia I both love and hate this. Meanwhile, the urge to purge most interactions with the modern web and simply rely on lynx & co. is increasing with each passing week.

neofox_peek_owo

@jra @mia this is one of my personal dilemmas too... We exclude old web and text only browsers, both of which have legitimate uses in our modern world.

So far i've found it easy to do ASN and user agent blocks instead.

jra Apr 27, 2025

@jessienab @mia My main issue with both user-agent blocks and a monster truck solution like Anubis is the fact that we're just sticking acid band-aids on top of acid band-aids while the older ones rot and decay. They might do the job for a while, but there's a cost. And the band-aid supply must be constant.

GenAI bots are a remarkably stupid example of scorched earth development, but, sadly, there's currently no way to fight them (in a technical sense) without searing the web a bit more ourselves.

𝓛𝔁𝓼 / 𝔸𝕝𝕖𝕩𝕚𝕤 🏵🇪🇺💫Apr 24, 2025

@gamesatwork_biz a topic for a future podcast :

https://void.rehab/notes/a6tp1qqquesrjpy5

gist: SDK that conducts proof-of-work on user devices & botnet-like actions to scrape data from web servers…

What delightful behaviour {sarcasm}.

@mia

glad we're at the stage of our cyberpunk hell-timeline that we have [corporate botnets](https://jan.wildeboer.net/2025/04/Web-is-Broken-Botnet-Part-2/) [DDoSing](https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me.html) the [free software communities](https://www.osnews.com/story/141969/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/) that they rely on, leading to [an arms race](https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/) between the biggest companies in the world and a [virtual anime person](https://www.twitch.tv/princessxen) developing a [proof-of-work proxy](https://anubis.techaro.lol/) with [an anime girl mascot](https://discourse.gnome.org/t/anime-girl-on-gnome-gitlab/27689) that's [now deployed by the united nations](https://xeiaso.net/notes/2025/anubis-works/)

void.rehab

lvl45 good doggie🐾💖✨🏳️‍⚧️Apr 24, 2025

@mia AAAAAAAAA

@mia Don't forget the part where the brand the anime person made is one letter off of "tech bro" and used to be used exclusively for industry satire

Techaro — Security Software & AI Consultancy

Techaro builds Anubis, BotStopper, and provides AI consultancy and custom software services.

Techaro