They do have a robots.txt [1] that disallows robot access to the spigot tree (as expected), but removing the /spigot/ part from the URL seems to still lead to Spigot. [2] The /~auj namespace is not disallowed in robots.txt, so even well-intentioned crawlers, if they somehow end up there, can get stuck in the infinite page zoo. That's not very nice.
previously the author wrote in a comment reply about not configuring robots.txt at all:
> I've not configured anything in my robots.txt and yes, this is an extreme position to take. But I don't much like the concept that it's my responsibility to configure my web site so that crawlers don't DOS it. In my opinion, a legitimate crawler ought not to be hitting a single web site at a sustained rate of > 15 requests per second.
josephg · 1h ago
> even well-intentioned crawlers, if they somehow end up there, can get stuck in the infinite page zoo. That's not very nice.
So? What duty do web site operators have to be "nice" to people scraping your website?
gary_0 · 59m ago
The Marginalia search engine or archive.org probably don't deserve such treatment--they're performing a public service that benefits everyone, for free. And it's generally not in one's best interests to serve a bunch of garbage to Google or Bing's crawlers, either.
suspended_state · 38m ago
The point is that not every web crawler is out there to scrape websites.
jandrese · 5h ago
I wonder if you could mess with AI input scrapers by adding fake captions to each image? I imagine something like:
(big green blob)
"My cat playing with his new catnip ball".
(blue mess of an image)
"Robins nesting"
Dwedit · 3h ago
A well-written scraper would check the image against a CLIP model or other captioning model to see if the text there actually agrees with the image contents.
Simran-B · 2h ago
Then captions that are somewhat believable? "Abstract digital art piece by F. U. Botts resembling wide landscapes in vibrant colors"
derefr · 9h ago
> It seems quite likely that this is being done via a botnet - illegally abusing thousands of people's devices. Sigh.
Just because traffic is coming from thousands of devices on residential IPs, doesn't mean it's a botnet in the classical sense. It could just as well be people signing up for a "free VPN service" — or a tool that "generates passive income" for them — where the actual cost of running the software, is that you become an exit node for both other "free VPN service" users' traffic, and the traffic of users of the VPN's sibling commercial brand. (E.g. scrapers like this one.)
Eh. To me, a bot is something users don't know they're running, and would shut off if they knew it was there.
Proxyware is more like a crypto miner — the original kind, from back when crypto-mining was something a regular computer could feasibly do with pure CPU power. It's something users intentionally install and run and even maintain, because they see it as providing them some potential amount of value. Not a bot; just a P2P network client.
(And both of these are different still to something like BitTorrent, where the user only ever seeds what they themselves have previously leeched — which is much less questionable in terms of what sort of activity you're agreeing to play host to.)
tgsovlerkhgsel · 8h ago
AFAIK much of the proxyware runs without the informed consent of the user. Sure, there may be some note on page 252 of the EULA of whatever adware the user downloaded, but most users wouldn't be aware of it.
ronsor · 8h ago
because it is, but it's a legal botnet
mrbluecoat · 10h ago
> I felt sorry for its thankless quest and started thinking about how I could please it.
A refreshing (and amusing) attitude versus getting angry and venting on forums about aggressive crawlers.
ASalazarMX · 10h ago
Helped without doubt by the capacity to inflict pain and garbage unto those nasty crawlers.
I was very excited 20 years ago, every time I got emails from them that the scripts and donated MX records on my website had helped catching a harvester
> Regardless of how the rest of your day goes, here's something to be happy about -- today one of your donated MXs helped to identify a previously unknown email harvester (IP: 172.180.164.102). The harvester was caught a spam trap email address created with your donated MX:
notpushkin · 1h ago
This is very neat. Honeypot scripts are fairly outdated though (and you can’t modify them according to ToS). The Python one only supports CGI and Zope out of the box, though I think you can make a wrapper to make it work with WSGI apps as well.
kazinator · 1h ago
Faking a JPEG is not only less CPU intensive than making one properly, but by doing os you are fuzzing whatever malware is on the other end; if it is decoding the JPEG and isn't robust, it may well crash.
superjan · 4h ago
There is a particular pattern (block/tag marker) that is illegal the compressed JPEG stream. If I recall correctly you should insert a 0x00 after a 0xFF byte in the output to avoid it. If there is interest I can followup later (not today).
Modified3019 · 8h ago
Love the effort.
That said, these seem to be heavily biased towards displaying green, so one “sanity” check would be if your bot is suddenly scraping thousands of green images, something might be up.
lvncelot · 2h ago
Nature photographers around the world rejoice as their content becomes safe from scraping.
ykonstant · 1h ago
Next we do it with red and blue :D
recursive · 7h ago
Mission accomplished I guess
112233 · 4h ago
So how do I set up an instance of this beautiful flytrap? Do I need a valid personal blog, or can I plop something on cloudflare to spin on their edge?
Given that current LLMs do not consistently output total garbage, and can be used as judges in a fairly efficient way, I highly doubt this could even in theory have any impact on the capabilities of future models. Once (a) models are capable enough to distinguish between semi-plausible garbage and possibly relevant text and (b) companies are aware of the problem, I do not think data poisoning will be an issue at all.
jesprenj · 9h ago
Yes, but you still waste their processing power.
immibis · 9h ago
There's no evidence that the current global DDoS is related to AI.
lblume · 2h ago
The linked page claims that most identified crawlers are related to scraping for training data of LLMs, which seems likely.
ykonstant · 1h ago
We have investigated nobody and found no evidence of malpractice!
bschwindHN · 10h ago
You should generate fake but believable EXIF data to go along with your JPEGs too.
russelg · 6h ago
They're taking the valid JPEG headers from images already on their site, so it's possible those are already in place.
electroglyph · 3h ago
there's no metadata in the example image
bigiain · 4h ago
Fake exif data with lat/longs showing the image was taken inside Area 51 or The Cheyenne Mountain Complex or Guantanamo Bay...
derektank · 10h ago
From the headline that's actually what I was expecting the link to discuss
hashishen · 9h ago
the hero we needed and deserved
puttycat · 8h ago
> compression tends to increase the entropy of a bit stream.
Does it?
Encryption increases entropy, but not sure about compression.
gregdeon · 8h ago
Yes: the reason why some data can be compressed is because many of its bits are predictable, meaning that it has low entropy per bit.
JCBird1012 · 8h ago
I can see what was meant with that statement. I do think compression increases Shannon entropy by virtue of it removing repeating patterns of data - Shannon entropy per byte of compressed data increases since it’s now more “random” - all the non-random patterns have been compressed out.
Total information entropy - no. The amount of information conveyed remains the same.
gary_0 · 2h ago
Technically with lossy compression, the amount of information conveyed will likely change. It could even increase the amount of information of the decompressed image, for instance if you compress a cartoon with simple lines and colors, a lossy algorithm might introduce artifacts that appear as noise.
dheera · 10h ago
> So the compressed data in a JPEG will look random, right?
I don't think JPEG data is compressed enough to be indistinguishable from random.
SD VAE with some bits lopped off gets you better compression than JPEG and yet the latents don't "look" random at all.
So you might think Huffman encoded JPEG coefficients "look" random when visualized as an image but that's only because they're not intended to be visualized that way.
maxbond · 8h ago
Encoded JPEG data is random in the same way cows are spherical.
BlaDeKke · 7h ago
Cows can be spherical.
bigiain · 4h ago
And have uniform density.
anyfoo · 2h ago
Yeah, but in practice you only get that in a perfect vacuum.
[1]: https://www.ty-penguin.org.uk/robots.txt
[2]: https://www.ty-penguin.org.uk concatenated with /~auj/cheese (don't want to create links there)
> I've not configured anything in my robots.txt and yes, this is an extreme position to take. But I don't much like the concept that it's my responsibility to configure my web site so that crawlers don't DOS it. In my opinion, a legitimate crawler ought not to be hitting a single web site at a sustained rate of > 15 requests per second.
So? What duty do web site operators have to be "nice" to people scraping your website?
Just because traffic is coming from thousands of devices on residential IPs, doesn't mean it's a botnet in the classical sense. It could just as well be people signing up for a "free VPN service" — or a tool that "generates passive income" for them — where the actual cost of running the software, is that you become an exit node for both other "free VPN service" users' traffic, and the traffic of users of the VPN's sibling commercial brand. (E.g. scrapers like this one.)
This scheme is known as "proxyware" — see https://www.trendmicro.com/en_ca/research/23/b/hijacking-you...
Proxyware is more like a crypto miner — the original kind, from back when crypto-mining was something a regular computer could feasibly do with pure CPU power. It's something users intentionally install and run and even maintain, because they see it as providing them some potential amount of value. Not a bot; just a P2P network client.
Compare/contrast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winny / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_(P2P) / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Dark_(P2P) — pieces of software which offer users a similar devil's bargain, but instead of "you get a VPN; we get to use your computer as a VPN", it's "you get to pirate things; we get to use your hard drive as a cache node in our distributed, encrypted-and-striped pirated media cache."
(And both of these are different still to something like BitTorrent, where the user only ever seeds what they themselves have previously leeched — which is much less questionable in terms of what sort of activity you're agreeing to play host to.)
A refreshing (and amusing) attitude versus getting angry and venting on forums about aggressive crawlers.
https://www.ty-penguin.org.uk/~auj/spigot/pics/2025/03/25/fa...
Some kind of statement piece
Firefox: Press F12, go to Network, click No Throttling > change it to GPRS
Chromium: Press F12, go to Network, click No Throttling > Custom > Add Profile > Set it to 20kbps and set the profile
https://www.ty-penguin.org.uk/~auj/spigot/pics/2025/03/25/fa...
Terry Pratchett has one I'd like to think he'd approve of. Just a shame I'm unable to see the 8th colour, I'm sure it's in there somewhere.
https://www.ty-penguin.org.uk/~auj/spigot/pics/2025/03/25/fa...
I was very excited 20 years ago, every time I got emails from them that the scripts and donated MX records on my website had helped catching a harvester
> Regardless of how the rest of your day goes, here's something to be happy about -- today one of your donated MXs helped to identify a previously unknown email harvester (IP: 172.180.164.102). The harvester was caught a spam trap email address created with your donated MX:
That said, these seem to be heavily biased towards displaying green, so one “sanity” check would be if your bot is suddenly scraping thousands of green images, something might be up.
https://github.com/gw1urf/spigot/
Does it? Encryption increases entropy, but not sure about compression.
Total information entropy - no. The amount of information conveyed remains the same.
I don't think JPEG data is compressed enough to be indistinguishable from random.
SD VAE with some bits lopped off gets you better compression than JPEG and yet the latents don't "look" random at all.
So you might think Huffman encoded JPEG coefficients "look" random when visualized as an image but that's only because they're not intended to be visualized that way.