Nepenthes

A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source tar pit to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their [crawlers] time and computing power. 


“It's less like flypaper and more an infinite maze holding a minotaur, except the crawler is the minotaur that cannot get out. The typical web crawler doesn't appear to have a lot of logic. It downloads a URL, and if it sees links to other URLs, it downloads those too,” Aaron B, the creator of Nepenthes, told 404 Media. 

“Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself —the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself,” they added.

“Of course, these crawlers are massively scaled, and are downloading links from large swathes of the internet at any given time,” they added. “But they [crawlers] are still consuming resources, spinning around doing nothing helpful, unless they [crawlers] find a way to detect that they [crawlers] are stuck in this loop.”


Comments

Post a Comment

Empathy recommended

Popular posts from this blog

Hamza Chaudhry

"Although a nuclear confrontation based on fake intelligence may seem unlikely, the stakes during crises are high and timelines are short, creating situations where fake data could well tilt the balance toward nuclear war. "The evolution of nuclear systems has led to further ambiguity in crises and shorter timeframes for verifying intelligence. An intercontinental ballistic missile from Russia could reach the U.S. within 25 minutes. A submarine-launched ballistic missile could arrive even sooner.  "Many modern missiles carry ambiguous payloads, making it unclear whether they are nuclear-tipped. AI tools for verifying the authenticity of content are not sufficiently reliable, making this ambiguity difficult to resolve in a short window. "The likeliest nuclear hotspots are also the arenas involving actors with low levels of trust on both sides — be that the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party or Russia, or India and Pakistan. Even if communication is established in a...
Read more

Perplexity

The year-old search engine , whose founders previously worked in A.I. research at OpenAI and Meta, has quickly become one of the most buzzed-about products in the tech world. Tech insiders rave about it on social media, and investors like Jeff Bezos — who was also an early investor in Google — have showered it with cash. The company recently announced that it had raised $74 million in a funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners, which valued the company at $520 million. Many start-ups have tried and failed to challenge Google over the years. (One would-be competitor, Neeva, shut down last year after failing to gain traction.)  But Google seems less invincible these days.   Many users have complained that their Google search results have gotten clogged with spammy, low-quality websites, and some people have started looking for answers in places like Reddit and TikTok instead.
Read more

Swarm 🦹‍♂️

"Knowledge discovery from data typically includes solving some type of an optimization problem that can be efficiently addressed using algorithms belonging to the class of evolutionary and bio-inspired computation .  "In this chapter, we give an overview of the various kinds of evolutionary algorithms, such as genetic algorithms, evolutionary strategy, evolutionary and genetic programming, differential evolution, and coevolutionary algorithms, as well as several other bio-inspired approaches, like swarm intelligence and artificial immune systems.  "After elaborating on the methodology, we provide numerous examples of applications in astronomy and geoscience and show how these algorithms can be applied within a distributed environment, by making use of parallel computing, which is essential when dealing with Big Data."
Read more