Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • What are they scraping the gentoo bugzilla for? I'm confused. Unless you're actively using Gentoo why would this be a resource? Very confusing. Also you'd think we'd have LLM BitTorrent by now, where if they want to scrape something we get a DHT hash for the content and share it with one another, rather than melt servers with the millionth request of the day.
    by jpcom
  • Hedgewars had to lock down its bugzilla and repo too, for the exact same reason. So far the really simple method used (basic auth with the creds posted on the main site) seems to have resisted the scrapers. Presumably if they are too stupid to scrape correctly they are also too stupid to incorporate a trivial auth.
    by capitainenemo
  • There are definitely patterns you can use against the scrapers. This maintainer just didn't have time for it, which is understandable.

    We direct scraper traffic to a bot-specific server using Cloudflare's load balancer, slowly analyzing traffic and adding conditions one at a time. No accidental scraper DDoS in a long time.

    Most scrapers are relatively honest in some way shape or form.

    by ComputerPerson
  • Manufactured consent. This is not AI, this is just DDoS'ing for extortion and driving towards the closed proprietary "can only be accessed by a sanctioned UA" Internet that they're after. Why else do you think identity verification and attempting to turn the Internet into a walled garden became such a big thing in the recent years?
    by userbinator
  • I don't really understand why there is resistance to in-browser Anubis-style gating using crypto mining for public sites like this.

    You mine crypto and my free service remains cost-neutral. Yes, that transfers some of the cost to you, but it is marginal.

    You want to bang on my servers with the fury of a thousand madmen, then I'll scale up the servers and you can pay the marginal cost of your access.

    Or micropayments, of course, but hard to get normal users to sign up for micropayments. Micropayments could of course be the way to bypass the crypto mining gate.

    by eYrKEC2
  • It is time for micropayments integrated in the browser. Pay 5 cents to access each bug report. Not fun, it shouldn't be like this, but better than not having a bugtracker at all.
    by littlecranky67
  • After a decade and half we had to restrict our public side and reorganize our old TED content because scrappers were really hungry for assorted captioned videos. If you have anything of value for training you get eaten alive if you stick out, it's like wearing short pants in the summer tundra.

    It's going to change a lot the internet we knew, unless somehow we managed to agree on a common high quality dataset repository.

    by FranOntanaya
  • While we're dealing with the same issue at work, I sometimes still wonder exactly who these scrapers are. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and others are normally fairly well behaved (Minus Anthropic attempting to hide behind a browser-for-hire company). Mostly you can get IP range and user-agents for the large players, while it problems mostly stem from bots pretending to be Chrome.

    Our largest offenders seems to be mostly limited to South-East Asia, so probably mostly Chinese AI projects, but that's speculation. I also don't recall ever seeing Grok IP ranges or a specific Grok UA, but that doesn't mean that they're hiding, perhaps they're just not interested.

    by mrweasel

Explore Birbla archives