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- Hacker News
- > We’re getting better at telling abusive bots apart from the people who depend on the Wayback Machine every day. If you think you were blocked in error, email info@archive.org with your operating system, browser, and IP address, and we’ll look into it.by CqtGLRGcukpy
- There is a HN article on abusive AI crawlers on the front page almost every week, but we rarely talk about the path forward. Web scraping has been around for as long as the internet, and it was fine because we had established best practices (rate limiting, self-identification, robots.txt, etc.) that the industry agreed upon. Now we have AI labs and their crawlers that don't care about any of this gentlemen's agreement. So how do we go from here? Is adding more difficult Anubis and Cloudflare bot protection really the solution? How many millions of human hours and billions in infra costs are we willing to spend on this arms race?
Some approaches that I think are promising:
- A robots.txt V2[0] as a standard way for website owners to state how bots and AI crawlers can use their online content and where to go (e.g. distinguish search from AI training use cases, point to a downloadable file instead of crawling everything, etc.).
- Something like Web Bot Auth[1] as a non-centralized standard for self-identifying bots and agents cryptographically. This would allow websites to allow or deny bots very precisely.
- what else?
[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-vaughan-machine-reada...
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meunier-http-mes...
by hubraumhugo - The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been hit by waves of high-volume automated traffic
Thank you for not immediately blaming it on "AI bots". I suspect there's some entity manufacturing consent for strong identity/age verification/sanctioned-browser-OS "walled garden" Internet, and these random DDoSes are part of that.
I knew something was up when a few alternative YouTube front-ends I use suddenly put up the 'nubis and complained about the high volumes of traffic they were getting flooded with; of course someone actually going after that data would be aiming their "AI bots" at YouTube directly instead of trying to suck it through a tiny little-known proxy-site, so it really strained the credibility of the argument.
by userbinator - I really appreciate the Archive team's efforts to make the Wayback Machine more responsive, and have donated a few times to support them.
Unfortunately, the restrictions have been way too strict for the last few months: from my residential IP, simply moving the mouse on the calendar for a specific URL is enough to get stuck on 429 error messages for a while; and from corporate ISPs (for example, on airport WiFi), you often can't access the WM at all. I hope they'll find a way to relax those.
by timpera - Wow, but I wonder if there's more to it.
I've not been able to access web.archive.org from my work computer - I always get the 429 error.
But I then pull out my phone and can access it just fine. All along I was assuming my company was blocking it. Still weird that it happens every time from my work PC and never from my home one.
by BeetleB - Unrelated, but this week I've been on a memory binge with the Wayback Machine, trying to find old content of mine from the early 2000s. Took me a while but I've finally put together a good bit of info about myself at the time that I'd completely forgotten, and it's all thanks to the Internet Archive storing my little gaming review website from when I was 16. I could barely remember any of the other stuff, it's been genuinely surprising figuring out what I'd forgotten. I couldn't even remember most domains I owned aside from one, which I used as the starting point.
Still can't remember what my Tripod site address was, but that might be lost to time.
Thank you, Archive.org.
by robotmay - Mad props to the people at the Archive. You are the heros we need in a formerly open internet that is surrendering to evil big corps and closing down free access.
The Internet Archive is in a really bad spot being attacked from multiple sides at once. But — while service has not been consistent — they have maintained open access. I can still access anonymously from Tor without Cloudflare or some other centralized gatekeeper showing me the middle finger.
If you got some money to spare, consider donating to them. They need it.
by basilikum - > Here’s what’s going on. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been hit by waves of high-volume automated traffic, and we’ve put protections in place to keep the service running.
I'm pretty certain this is scrapers that are trying to workaround blocks on accessing original sites by hitting the Wayback Machine copy instead. Appalling behavior.
In addition to the load it puts on this vital non-profit piece of Internet infrastructure, we've also already seen some sites opt out of the Wayback Machine to prevent their content from being scraped via this alternative route.
by simonw