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Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots

"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."

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 time and computing power. DO NOT DEPLOY IF YOU AREN’T FULLY COMFORTABLE WITH WHAT YOU’RE DOING.” It also notes it can be deployed “defensively” to “flood our valid URLs within your site’s domain name, making it unlikely the crawler will access the real content” and “offensively” to actively trap and waste computing power: “Let's say you've got horsepower and bandwidth to burn, and just want to see these AI models burn. I was just sick and tired of how the internet is evolving into a money extraction panopticon, how the world as a whole is slipping into fascism and oligarchs are calling all the shots - and it's gotten bad enough we can't boycott or vote our way out, we have to start causing real pain to those above for any change to occur.”

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