In the past few weeks there has been a bot farm hammering small Mastodon instances with requests for what looks like emoji-related assets and the hashtag API.

More specifically, it appears this bot farm has now come for my Mastodon instance, because the number of requests has doubled in the last 24 hours, with a lot of the requests being API requests for a single JSON file.

Even more specifically, looking at data provided by my CDN provider, a lot of the bots appear to be using IP addresses associated with Tencent Singapore.

#MastoAdmin #Mastodon

Looks like I have this to investigate now because a warning is appearing on my admin dashboard. Whatever the problem is seems to affect Elasticsearch 7.17.23 and Mastodon 4.4.2 , because this never appeared on Mastodon 4.3.x and the suggested command only returns this error:

[400] {"error":{"root_cause":[{"type":"illegal_argument_exception","reason":"unknown setting [index.analysis] please check that any required plugins are installed, or check the breaking changes documentation for removed settings"}],"type":"illegal_argument_exception","reason":"unknown setting [index.analysis] please check that any required plugins are installed, or check the breaking changes documentation for removed settings"},"status":400}

#MastoAdmin

Great, just what I needed. Apparently even Amazon now have a web crawler which collects data to do what they describe as "improve our services, such as enabling Alexa to more accurately answer questions for customers".

It also looks like they use crawled data for training LLM too. So now, any data you have on your website could be used to train the next LLM AI model too.

Wonder if it has anything to do with this #AlexaPlus thing?

Information on the Amazon website at https://developer.amazon.com/amazonbot

#Amazon #LLM #noAI #Alexa