this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Evidence for the DDoS attack that bigtech LLM scrapers actually are.

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[–] raoul@lemmy.sdf.org 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

The only simple possibles ways are:

  • robot.txt
  • rate limiting by ip
  • blocking by user agent

From the article, they try to bypass all of them:

They also don't give a single flying fuck about robots.txt ...

If you try to rate-limit them, they'll just switch to other IPs all the time. If you try to block them by User Agent string, they'll just switch to a non-bot UA string (no, really). This is literally a DDoS on the entire internet.

It then become a game of whac a mole with big tech πŸ˜“

~~The more infuriating for me is that it's done by the big names, and not some random startup.~~ Edit: Now that I think about it, this doesn't prove it is done by Google or Amazon: it can be someone using random popular user agents

[–] jherazob@fedia.io 7 points 1 week ago

I do believe there's blocklists for their IPs out there, that should mitigate things a little