Comment on AI companies are violating a basic social contract of the web and and ignoring robots.txt

• BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.html
  

  Any 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.

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  • 4am@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    server {

    name herebedragons.example.com; root /dev/random;

    }

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    • PlexSheep@feddit.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Nice idea! Better use /dev/urandom through, as that is non blocking. See here.

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      • aniki@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        That was really interesting. I always used urandom by practice and wondered what the difference was.

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    • aniki@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I wonder if Nginx would just load random into memory and crash if you did this.

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  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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• ShitpostCentral@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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• ricecake@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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