Full title: I hid a link on my website that only bots can see and told them not to follow it. They broke the rules and in 4 days they went 124,414 levels deep into an endless maze. One bot opened 782,580 doors. I thought this was super interesting, this is how the internet is these days. Thought I’d share.
You hid the link? Really?
Iocane is software designed to do this
Is it possible to have the bots recursively give themselves instructions and birth child instances of themselves that do the same thing? Because if it’s ai bots, that could absolutely be maliciously exploited.
So what you’re implying is this should be implemented in every website in both follow/not follow just to waste their money?
[Everyone liked this.]
Can anyone explain what is happening behind the scenes with the “room creation”?? That sounds intriguing. I understand OP is a bot but, is anything described here an actual way of trapping crawlers? How are the crawlers fooled by any of this?
He placed an invisible link on his website. Only visible by reading the page content (html). Then the bots followed the link. This link lead to a page with 5 links (door) four links are dead and one leads to another page (level) with again 5 links.
I guess the links and pages are generated on the go. So the bots and crawlers may follow the links forever of they like.
Man do I hate the age we live in now, where people are actively having to declare war on scrapers like this because AI bros have literally zero respect towards the rest of the internet.
I just hope all that endless maze scraping cost some asshat a decent chunk of money.
Right! This isn’t “AI going rogue”, it’s software agents made and employed by perfectly human psychopaths, doing what they were made to do.
I just hope all that endless maze scraping cost some asshat a decent chunk of money.
Unfortunately, it probably cost the maze’s owner nearly as much, due to all the traffic.
I’m afraid to ask about the energy footprint. But what the heck, what do we know about it?
What if instead of trying to cost them directly with crawling, you made what they crawl worthless? Could somewhat ironically use an LLM to generate gibberish output for them to feed on. Or a bash script can do it too.
That’s exactly what Iocaine does.
Is ironic the word for OP being a repost bot? Or is it just expected at this point?
How do you know? Just curious.
Post history and seeing the same username every day. Plus they rarely every respond to questions and comments when they post and what they respond with is generic.
Shit, sounds like me.
Basic bitch detected
Maybe it’s the bot of the guy who thought the only way to save the threadiverse is by having bots repost almost everything from Reddit.
What’s the purpose of doing this as a bot but not declaring the account as a bot account? On other sites, they do it for karma farming, but that doesn’t really apply here, right?
Probably just another layer of analytics for engagement bait in other spaces. They can also copy top comments and train LLMs and whatever else every bad actor does to every internet comment site now. They are like a slime mold and grow toward any source of nutrition except it’s an n-dimensional maze and the nutrition is influencing public opinion and scamming people.
If you see the same username every day, that means you are on every day… only a spy would do that.
Suspected Chinese agent, possibly Russian
Yeah I don’t know a single person who gets on the internet every day. I’m so uNiQuE and special!
In other words, you don’t really know - not that there’s anything wrong with that. Opinions and “it’s obvious” are the social media standard for “fact”.
That user has a history of reposting reddit content and the format and pattern of posts are obviously not human. All of its posts are originally from reddit. A simple search of its posts will show you they are copied word for word from an older reddit post. What more evidence do you need?
I prefer to think of it as being observant and investigating but to each their own. OP has been called out on almost every post and never defended themselves. Could be a human who doesn’t check the replies but either way, the behavior is the same.
Nah those people complaining are reddit agents. Trying to ruin lemmy
There’s plenty of documented evidence of alt bots from moderators. Also, the lack of source link is a key factor in why people are interpreting your post that way.
Comments accusing critics of being “Reddit Agents” are an indicator of a specific spammer. They are a proven operator of LLM-driven spambots. Two weeks ago one of their alts, sanitation@lemmy.today, left their prompt in the title and body of a post.
Meh. Ya welcome for content.
Accusing people of spamming when they given you content is an indication of a reddit agent that intentionally conflate those ideas with spam.
You are a spammer. You contribute nothing and drown out real users.
As I told you on your other account, you are the one bringing reddit into the threadiverse.
lol not even a little. I’m trying to grow my lemmy communities. I have no problem with it being a bot, that’s why I haven’t blocked it. My issue is that it’s not declared as a bot. Several times I’ve found myself asking further questions to just realize, it’s that same guy who posted a “my super cool thing” five minutes ago and I won’t get a response to my question. There’s no way he has a jurrasic park themed turtle sanctuary in addition to the other 50 sweet things in his house/yard/town/
We can ruin our own instances thank you very much.
Designing impossible mazes for AI to get lost in as a matter of civil defense? What a fucking world we live in…
There’s a few open source programs out there for doing precisely this. Iocaine, Nepenthes, and Book of Infinity are the three I know of. There may be more
🔥 this is fine
“You” did no such thing.
Account blocked. Bot, or not.
deleted by creator
Apparently some bot programmers are assholes who ignore
rel="nofollow".robots.txt only keeps the honest robots out
No, you didn’t.
Yeah I have OP listed as “repost bot” so if I see something cool I can go check somewhere else for the info.
How do you know?
Look at their profile. 460 posts, 45 comments, in just 1 month. If they aren’t automating their posts they need to go touch grass.
An overwhelming number of their posts have titles like “I made this thing”, but are clearly just popular posts ripped straight from Reddit.
I also have them tagged as a repost bot. I’m not blocking them, but don’t bother trying to engage like the content is somehow organic or original.
Ah ok, thanks. How do you tag users?
Certain apps can do it, such as Summit or Boost. I believe it’s also built into Piefed.
Yeah, that’s my issue. Like some stuff is cool, I want to ask follow up questions. But OP didn’t make or create any of the things they’re posting so they’ll never know the answer. Which is fine, if you link to the original source. I understand that sometimes you can’t link the original source but like, be upfront. I repost things from reddit in !bestofinternetupdates@lemmy.world. But I do it by hand and I link back to the original locations in case people want more information or to see the original source.
You can find the original post on Reddit, somebody has already linked the original post down the thread. This is typical of this user and a few others like sanitation who have become notorious for using Reddit repost bots many times with errors in the repost like not having all of the image or not having any of the post body.
It’s very annoying.
Also interested in how you know. Just commenting to get notificated (:
Post quantities are a big indicator. A stronger indicator in this case is that their only comment on this post is accusing people of being “Reddit Agents”. That points to a specific spambot operator with multiple alts that refuses to declare any of them as bots. They had a malfunction two weeks ago that left their LLM prompt in a post.
You can also usually just look up the top posts on Reddit via redlib and find the word for word post there, if you really wanted to be sure.
Thank you very much :)
What is this? It’s really freaking me out.
You know, I wonder if the AI agents are willing to open random zip files they find on websites, and I’m further curious if they’re smart enough to avoid a zip bomb.
You can serve zip bombs as web pages since most crawlers support gzip encoding.
And yes it’s very effective ;)
Can follow JWZ for practical experience on this kind of thing - apparently it is getting so bad that even opening a connection to deliver the zip bombs is getting infeasible now.
Thank you for your service!
It’s ironic that you advertise yourself as having “time to lose” but you don’t have “time to replace 1st person pronouns with more accurate 3rd person ones.”
