Pleased to share a page and explainer for the AI tarpit project Science is Poetry, with legal statement, rationale(s), and a few deployment notes:

https://julianoliver.com/projects/science-is-poetry/

The page may grow a bit. Just wanted to get it out the door.

#AI #bigtech

Science is Poetry

If you're interested in learning more about implementations of resistance in this era of unchecked Big AI, direct action strategies and the techno-politics therein, be sure to check out ASRG's site (https://algorithmic-sabotage.gitlab.io/asrg/) and give them a follow here on Mastodon (@[email protected]).

They've put a lot of heartbeats and neurons - human stuff - into this area.

ASRG

Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group (ASRG)

ASRG

A newcomer frantically lost in the Caves of Babble.

----
3.215.221.125 - - [16/Apr/2026:06:14:25 +0200] "GET /noodles/images/primigenous/orchiepididymitis/Lord/havent.png HTTP/1.1" 200 111459 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot) Chrome/119.0.6045.214 Safari/537.36" "-"
----

About AmazonBot

Customer facing page of Amazonbot crawler which all web content publishers can refer to.

Developer Portal Master

Do you have an unused domain that you would be happy to donate to a counter-offensive against unchecked & unregulated AI crawlers that scrape human-made content to simulate & deceive for profit?

If so, pls reply to this post. Your domain would become an entrypoint to the AI tarpit & Poison-as-a-Service project below, allowing concerned public to choose to use it on their sites, helping make the project more resilient to blacklisting.

https://julianoliver.com/projects/science-is-poetry/

#ai #bigtech #tacticalmedia

Science is Poetry

A bit over half a million page reads a day by crawlers rn. Just to say the server is doing some good work.
Thanks all for the fine domains! I've decided to spin up a new VM and do all the site configs and TLS chain for them at once - more efficient, less prone to error. I will get onto that on my tomorrow and report back here.
SEANCE IS POTTERY

I have only linked them here and on the landing page, and already it's gone nuts.

These are *solely* the new domains you've donated, all in one log. These do not pertain to the project domain.

I've started to harvest a list of AI crawler endpoint addrs for your blacklisting pleasure.

I'll try to keep it updated. I've been fastidious with ensuring I'm only pulling those related to the known user agent, so as not to have any false positives

https://scienceispoetry.net/files/parasites.txt

It is at the same path for all contributed domains.

For instance:

https://carrot.mro1.de/files/parasites.txt

It's approaching DoS at this point. This just one of the VMs, and just OpenAI's parasite.

Threading's holding up but need some more tuning of rate limits and burst. Trying sending 429's now to ask them to play nice.

To think the www was built for people.

And here we are

Even faster now.

Again, these pages are randomly generated, and each line is a page request from a crawler.

To think of the energy expended at a global scale, the waste. All the money, water & minerals thrown at this. These AI companies are near DoS'ing the human web as they deep-sea trawl our content.

Computationally, infrastructurally, & culturally, it's an obscenity,

- Mum, if you made a chain out of all the endpoint addresses of AI crawlers, how far would it reach?

- All the way to the moon, darling. All the way to the moon.

https://scienceispoetry.net/files/parasites.txt

Here's a thing I did in a couple of mins to ban all IPs in the parasites.txt serverside. You could ofc REJECT rather than DROP to send a message.

---
#!/bin/bash

while read parasite;
do
if [[ "$parasite" == *"."* ]]; then
iptables -I INPUT -s "$parasite" -j DROP
elif [[ "$parasite" == *":"* ]]; then
ip6tables -I INPUT -s "$parasite" -j DROP
fi
done < /path/to/parasites.txt
---

Actual hits dropping slightly, but more data is pulled from the tarpit day on day. This is reflected by a higher proportion of HTTP 200's - so less bad req's. Less reaching for what isn't there, just want the madness.

Unclear why this has changed.

@JulianOliver They might be re-fetching old URLs?
@neoluddite @JulianOliver At work we noticed that when we changed from html generated search links (nofollow was ignored) to JavaScript generated links, a lot of bots stopped coming back but there were some (mainly from residential proxies) that appear to have cached the URLs and came back for more.