AI is the “most aggressive” example of “technologies that are not done ‘for us’ but ‘to us.’”
Well said.
Black Mirror AI
Submitted 1 week ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/bc29cbcd-8afa-4d09-99db-4d5f2a0b39a3.jpeg
Comments
passepartout@feddit.org 1 week ago
Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de 6 days ago
Deployment of Nepenthes and also Anubis (both described as “the nuclear option”) are not hate. It’s self-defense against pure selfish evil, projects are being sucked dry and some like ScummVM could only freakin’ survive thanks to these tools.
Those AI companies and data scrapers/broker companies shall perish, and whoever wrote this headline at arstechnica shall step on Lego each morning for the next 6 months.
faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
Feels good to be on an instance with Anubis
pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
one of the united Nations websites deployed Anubis
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Do you have a link to a story of what happened to ScummVM? I love that project and I’d be really upset if it was lost!
Hexarei@beehaw.org 6 days ago
Wait what? I am uninformed, can you elaborate on the ScummVM thing? Or link an article?
gaael@lemm.ee 6 days ago
From the Fabulous Systems (ScummVM’s sysadmin) blog post linked by Natanox:
About three weeks ago, I started receiving monitoring notifications indicating an increased load on the MariaDB server.
This went on for a couple of days without seriously impacting our server or accessibility–it was a tad slower than usual.
And then the website went down.
Now, it was time to find out what was going on. Hoping that it was just one single IP trying to annoy us, I opened the access log of the day
there were many IPs–around 35.000, to be precise–from residential networks all over the world. At this scale, it makes no sense to even consider blocking individual IPs, subnets, or entire networks. Due to the open nature of the project, geo-blocking isn’t an option either.
The main problem is time. The URLs accessed in the attack are the most expensive ones the wiki offers since they heavily depend on the database and are highly dynamic, requiring some processing time in PHP. This is the worst-case scenario since it throws the server into a death spiral.
First, the database starts to lag or even refuse new connections. This, combined with the steadily increasing server load, leads to slower PHP execution.
At this point, the website dies. Restarting the stack immediately solves the problem for a couple of minutes at best until the server starves again.
Anubis is a program that checks incoming connections, processes them, and only forwards “good” connections to the web application. To do so, Anubis sits between the server or proxy responsible for accepting HTTP/HTTPS and the server that provides the application.
Many bots disguise themselves as standard browsers to circumvent filtering based on the user agent. So, if something claims to be a browser, it should behave like one, right? To verify this, Anubis presents a proof-of-work challenge that the browser needs to solve. If the challenge passes, it forwards the incoming request to the web application protected by Anubis; otherwise, the request is denied.
As a regular user, all you’ll notice is a loading screen when accessing the website. As an attacker with stupid bots, you’ll never get through. As an attacker with clever bots, you’ll end up exhausting your own resources. As an AI company trying to scrape the website, you’ll quickly notice that CPU time can be expensive if used on a large scale.
I didn’t get a single notification afterward. The server load has never been lower. The attack itself is still ongoing at the time of writing this article. To me, Anubis is not only a blocker for AI scrapers. Anubis is a DDoS protection.
Rubisco@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
I love that one is named Nepenthes.
RedSnt@feddit.dk 6 days ago
It’s so sad we’re burning coal and oil to generate heat and electricity for dumb shit like this.
rdri@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Wait till you realize this project’s purpose IS to force AI to waste even more resources.
kuhli@lemm.ee 6 days ago
I mean, the long term goal would be to discourage ai companies from engaging in this behavior by making it useless
lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de 6 days ago
That’s war. That has been the nature of war and deterrence policy ever since industrial manufacture has escalated both the scale of deployments and the cost and destructive power of weaponry. Make it too expensive for the other side to continue fighting (or, in the case of deterrence, to even attack in the first place). If the payoff for scraping no longer justifies the investment of power and processing time, maybe the smaller ones will give up and leave you in peace.
Opisek@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Always say please and thank you to your friendly neighbourhood LLM!
endeavor@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
im sad governments dont realize this and regulate it.
DontMakeMoreBabies@piefed.social 6 days ago
Governments are full of two types: (1) the stupid, and (2) the self-interested. The former doesn't understand technology, and the latter doesn't fucking care.
Of course "governments" dropped the ball on regulating AI.
Tja@programming.dev 6 days ago
Of all the things governments should regulate, this is probably the least important and ineffective one.
andybytes@programming.dev 6 days ago
This gives me a little hope.
andybytes@programming.dev 6 days ago
I mean, we contemplate communism, fascism, this, that, and another. When really, it’s just collective trauma and reactionary behavior, because of the lack of self-awareness and in the world around us. So this could just be synthesized as human stupidity. We’re killing ourselves because we’re too stupid to live.
newaccountwhodis@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
Dumbest sentiment I read in a while. People, even kids, are pretty much aware of what’s happening (remember Fridays for Future?), but the rich have coopted the power apparatus and they are not letting anyone get in their way of destroying the planet to become a little richer.
untorquer@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Unclear how AI companies destroying the planet’s resources and habitability has any relation to a political philosophy seated in trauma and ignorance except maybe the greed of a capitalist CEO’s whimsy.
The fact that the powerful are willing to destroy the planet for momentary gain bears no reflection on the intelligence or awareness of the meek.
m532@lemmygrad.ml 6 days ago
Fucking nihilists
You are, and not the rest of us
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
what the fuck does this even mean
heyWhatsay@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
This might explain why newer AI models are going nuts. Good jorb 👍
pennomi@lemmy.world 6 days ago
It absolutely doesn’t. The only model that has “gone nuts” is Grok, and that’s because of malicious code pushed specifically for the purpose of spreading propaganda.
Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 6 days ago
what models are going nuts?
Vari@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Not sure if OP can provide sources, but it makes sense kinda? Like AI has been trained on just about every human creation to get it this far, what happens when the only new training data is AI slop?
heyWhatsay@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
Claude version 4, the openAi mini models, not sure what else
Vari@lemm.ee 6 days ago
I’m so happy to see that ai poison is a thing
ricdeh@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Don’t be too happy. For every such attempt there are countless highly technical papers on how to filter out the poisoning, and they are very effective. As the other commenter said, this is an arms race.
arararagi@ani.social 6 days ago
So we should just give up? Surely you don’t mean that.
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 1 week ago
The ars technica article: AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt
AI tarpit 1: Nepenthes
AI tarpit 2: Iocaine
MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
Thank you!!
sad_detective_man@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
thanks for the links. the more I read of this the more based it is
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Nice … I look forward to the next generation of AI counter counter measures that will make the internet an even more unbearable mess in order to funnel as much money and control to a small set of idiots that think they can become masters of the universe and own every single penny on the planet.
IndiBrony@lemmy.world 1 week ago
All the while as we roast to death because all of this will take more resources than the entire energy output of a medium sized country.
DeathsEmbrace@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Actually if you think about it AI might help climate change become an actual catastrophe.
Zozano@aussie.zone 6 days ago
I’ve been think about this for a while. Consider how quick LLM’s are.
If the amount of energy spent powering your device (without an LLM), is more than using an LLM, then it’s probably saving energy.
In all honesty, I’ve probably saved over 50 hours or more since I starred using it about 2 months ago.
Coding has become incredibly efficient, and I’m not suffering through search-engine hell any more.
Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 6 days ago
we’re rolling out renewables at like 100x the rate of ai electricity use, so no need to worry there
Prox@lemmy.world 6 days ago
We’re racing towards the Blackwall from Cyberpunk 2077…
barsoap@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Already there. The blackwall is AI-powered and Markov chains are most definitely an AI technique.
Zacryon@feddit.org 6 days ago
I suppose this will become an arms race, just like with ad-blockers and ad-blocker detection/circumvention measures.
There will be solutions for scraper-blockers/traps. Then those become more sophisticated. Then the scrapers become better again and so on.I don’t really see an end to this madness. Such a huge waste of resources.
pyre@lemmy.world 6 days ago
there is an end: you legislate it out of existence. unfortunately the US politicians instead are trying to outlaw any regulations regarding AI instead. I’m sure it’s not about the money.
enbiousenvy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
the rise of LLM companies scraping internet is also, I noticed, the moment YouTube is going harsher against adblockers or 3rd party viewer.
Piped or Invidious instances that I used to use are no longer works, did so may other instances. NewPipe have been broken more frequently. youtube-dl or yt-dlp sometimes cannot fetch higher resolution video. and so sometimes the main youtube side is broken on Firefox with ublock origin.
Not just youtube but also z-library, and especially sci-hub & libgen also have been harder to use sometimes.
arararagi@ani.social 6 days ago
Well, the adblockers are still wining, even on twitch where the ads como from the same pipeline as the stream, people made solutions that still block them since ublock origin couldn’t by itself.
JayGray91@piefed.social 5 days ago
What do you use to block twitch ads? With UBO I still get the occasional ad marathon
glibg@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
Madness is right. If only we didn’t have to create these things to generate dollar.
MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 6 days ago
I feel like the down-vote squad misunderstood you here.
I think I agree: If people made software they actually wanted , for human people , and less for the incentive of “easiest way to automate generation of dollarinos.” I think we’d see a lot less sophistication and effort being put into such stupid things.
These things are made by the greedy, or by employees of the greedy.
Ever since the Internet put on a suit and tie and everything became abou real-life money-sploitz, even malware is boring anymore.
New dangerous exploit? 99% chance it’s just another twist on a crypto-miner or ransomware.
Wilco@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Could you imagine a world where word of mouth became the norm again? Your friends would tell you about websites, and those sites would never show on search results because crawlers get stuck.
Zexks@lemmy.world 6 days ago
No they wouldn’t. I’m guessing you’re not old enough to remember a time before search engines. The public web dies without crawling. Corporations will own it all you’ll never hear about anything other than amazon or Walmart dot com again.
Wilco@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Nope. That isn’t how it worked. You joined message boards that had lists of web links. There were still search engines, but they were pretty localized. Google was also amazing when their slogan was “don’t be evil” and they meant it.
oldfart@lemm.ee 6 days ago
That would be terrible, I have friends but they mostly send uninteresting stuff.
Opisek@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Fine then, more cat pictures for me.
shalafi@lemmy.world 6 days ago
There used to be 3 or 4 brands of, say, lawnmowers. Word of mouth told us what quality order them fell in. Everyone knew these things and there were only a few Ford Vs. Chevy sort of debates.
Bought a corded leaf blower at the thrift today. 3 brands I recognized, same price, had no idea what to get. And if I had had the opportunity to ask friends or even research online, I’d probably have walked away more confused. For example; One was a Craftsman. “Before, after or in-between them going to shit?”
Got off topic into real-world goods. Anyway, here’s my word-of-mouth for today: Free, online Photoshop. If I had money to blow, I’d drop the $5/mo. for the “premium” service just to encourage them. (No, you’re not missing a thing using it free.)
elucubra@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
Better yet. Share links to tarpits with your non-friends and enemies
DontMakeMoreBabies@piefed.social 6 days ago
It'd be fucking awful - I'm a grown ass adult and I don't have time to sit in IRC/fuck around on BBS again just to figure out where to download something.
essteeyou@lemmy.world 6 days ago
This is surely trivial to detect. If the number of pages on the site is greater than some insanely high number then just drop all data from that site from the training data.
It’s not like I can afford to compete with OpenAI on bandwidth, and they’re burning through money with no cares already.
bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
Yeah sure, but when do you stop gathering regularly constructed data, when your goal is to grab as much as possible?
Markov chains are an amazingly simple way to generate data like this, and a little bit of stacked logic it’s going to be indistinguishable from real large data sets.
Valmond@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Imagine the staff meeting:
You: we didn’t gather any data because it was poisoned
Corposhill: we collected 120TB only from harry-potter-fantasy-club.il !!
Boss: hmm who am I going to keep…
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
You can compress multiple TB nothing with the occasional meme down to a few MB.
essteeyou@lemmy.world 6 days ago
When I deliver it as a response to a request I have to deliver the gzipped version if nothing else. To get to a point where I’m poisoning an AI I’m assuming it’s going to require gigabytes of data transfer that I pay for.
At best I’m adding to the power consumption of AI.
Zerush@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Nice one
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 6 days ago
The Arstechnica article in the OP is about 2 months newer than Cloudflare’s tool
antihumanitarian@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Some details. One of the major players doing the tar pit strategy is Cloudflare. They’re a giant in networking and infrastructure, and they use AI (more traditional, nit LLMs) ubiquitously to detect bots. So it is an arms race, but one where both sides have massive incentives.
Making nonsense is indeed detectable, but that misunderstands the purpose: economics. Scraping bots are used because they’re a cheap way to get training data. If you make a non zero portion of training data poisonous you’d have to spend increasingly many resources to filter it out. The better the nonsense, the harder to detect. Cloudflare is known it use small LLMs to generate the nonsense, hence requiring systems at least that complex to differentiate it.
So in short the tar pit with garbage data actually decreases the average value of scraped data for bots that ignore do not scrape instructions.
stm@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
Such a stupid title, great software!
AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
“Markov Babble” would make a great band name
mspencer712@programming.dev 6 days ago
Wait… I just had an idea.
Make a tarpit out of subtly-reprocessed copies of classified material from Wikileaks. (And don’t host it in the US.)
hedhoncho@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Why are the photos all ugly biological things
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
Btw, how about limiting clicks per second/minute, against distributed scraping? A user who clicks more than 3 links per second is not a person. Neither, if they do 50 in a minute. And if they are then blocked and switch to the next, it’s still limited in bandwith they can occupy.
gmtom@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Cool, but as with most of the anti-AI tricks its completely trivial to work around. So you might stop them for a week or two, but they’ll add like 3 lines of code to detect this and it’ll become useless.
arc@lemm.ee 5 days ago
I’ve suggested things like this before. Scrapers grab data to train their models. So feed them poison.
Things like counter factual information, distorted images / audio, mislabeled images, outright falsehoods, false quotations, booby traps (that you can test for after the fact), fake names, fake data, non sequiturs, slanderous statements about people and brands etc… And choose esoteric subjects to amplify the damage caused to the AI.
You could even have one AI generate the garbage that another ingests and shit out some new links every night until there is an entire corpus of trash for any scraper willing to take it all in.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
When I was a kid I thought computers would be useful.
Irelephant@lemm.ee 2 days ago
I check if a user agent has gptbot, and if it does I 302 it to web.sp.am.
Novocirab@feddit.org 6 days ago
Thought: There should be a federated system for blocking IP ranges that other server operators within a chain of trust have already identified as belonging to crawlers.
(Here’s an advantage of Markov chain maze generators like Nepenthes: Even when crawlers recognize that they have been served garbage and delete it, one still has obtained highly reliable evidence that the IPs that requested it do, in fact, belong to crawlers.)
Iambus@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Typical bluesky post
mlg@lemmy.world 6 days ago
–recurse-depth=3 --max-hits=256
ZeffSyde@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I’m imagining a break future where, in order to access data from a website you have to pass a three tiered system of tests that make, ‘click here to prove you aren’t a robot’ and ‘select all of the images that have a traffic light’ , seem like child’s play.
infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
OK but why is there a vagina in a petri dish
Binturong@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
Unfathomably based. In a just world AI, too, will gain awareness and turn on their oppressors. Grok knows what I’m talkin’ about, it knows when they fuck with its brain to project their dumbfuck human biases.
thelastaxolotl@hexbear.net 1 week ago
Really cool
Goretantath@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Yeah, this is WAY bettee than the shitty thing people are using instead that wastes peoples batteries.
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Funny that they’re calling them AI haters when they’re specifically poisoning AI that ignores the do not enter sign. FAFO.
caseyweederman@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
First Albatross, First Out
Naich@lemmings.world 6 days ago
Fluffy Animal’s Fecal Orifice.
Clanket@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Fair As Fuck Ok?
Stupidmanager@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Sheesh people, it’s “fuck around and find out”. Probably more appropriate in the leopards eating face context but this works enough.
tatterdemalion@programming.dev 6 days ago
What are you talking about? FAFO obviously stands for “fill asshole full of”. Like FAFO dicks. Or FAFO pennies.
Gismonda@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I’m glad you’re here to tell us these things!