this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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This is fine. I support archiving the Internet.
It kinda drives me crazy how normalized anti-scraping rhetoric is. There is nothing wrong with (rate limited) scraping
The only bots we need to worry about are the ones that POST, not the ones that GET
GET requests can still overload a system.
It’s not fine. They are not archiving the internet.
I had to ban their user agent after very aggressive scraping that would have taken down our servers. Fuck this shitty behaviour.
Isn't there a way to limit requests so that traffic isn't bringing down your servers
They obfuscate their traffic by randomizing user agents, so it's either add a global rate limit, or let them ass fuck you
I had to block ByteSpider at work because it can't even parse HTML correctly and just hammers the same page and accounts to sometimes 80% of the traffic hitting a customer's site and taking it down.
The big problem with AI scrapers is unlike Google and traditional search engines, they just scrape so aggressively. Even if it's all GETs, they hit years old content that's not cached and use up the majority of the CPU time on the web servers.
Scraping is okay, using up a whole 8 vCPU instance for days to feed AI models is not. They even actively use dozens of IPs to bypass the rate limits too, so theyre basically DDoS'ing whoever they scrape with no fucks given. I've been woken up by the pager way too often due to ByteSpider.
My next step is rewriting all the content with GPT-2 and serving it to bots so their models collapse.
I think a common nginx config is to just redirect malicious bots to some well-cached terrabyte file. I think hetzner hosts one iirc
https://github.com/iamtraction/ZOD
42kB ZIP file which decompresses into 4.5 PB.
Bytedance ain’t looking to build an archival tool. This is to train gen AI models.
Bullshit. This bot doesn't identify itself as a bot and doesn't rate limit itself to anything that would be an appropriate amount. We were seeing more traffic from this thing that all other crawlers combined.
Not rate limiting is bad. Hate them because of that, not because they're a bot.
Some bots are nice
I don't hate all bots, I hate this bot specifically because:
Even if they were rate limiting they're still just using the bot to train an AI. If it's from a company there's a 99% chance the bot is bad. I'm leaving 1% for whatever the Internet Archive (are they even a company tho?) is doing.