I hid a link on my website that only bots can see and told them not to follow it. They broke the rules and in 4 days they went 124,414 levels deep into an endless maze. One bot opened 782,580 doors.…
Full title: I hid a link on my website that only bots can see and told them not to follow it. They broke the rules and in 4 days they went 124,414 levels deep into an endless maze. One bot opened 782,580 doors. I thought this was super interesting, this is how the internet is these days. Thought I’d share.
118 replies
Designing impossible mazes for AI to get lost in as a matter of civil defense? What a fucking world we live in…
🔥 this is fine
There's a few open source programs out there for doing precisely this. Iocaine, Nepenthes, and Book of Infinity are the three I know of. There may be more
We're probably about a decade away from the Blackwall, choom. (2 according to the sourcebooks, but I think Pondsmith may have been a little optimistic.)
Cyberspace ain't a space, choom.
Man do I hate the age we live in now, where people are actively having to declare war on scrapers like this because AI bros have literally zero respect towards the rest of the internet.
I just hope all that endless maze scraping cost some asshat a decent chunk of money.
Right! This isn't "AI going rogue", it's software agents made and employed by perfectly human psychopaths, doing what they were made to do.
Unfortunately, it probably cost the maze's owner nearly as much, due to all the traffic.
What if instead of trying to cost them directly with crawling, you made what they crawl worthless? Could somewhat ironically use an LLM to generate gibberish output for them to feed on. Or a bash script can do it too.
That's exactly what Iocaine does.
They use Markov chains to generate the text. Which makes the data actively harmful to train on.
I’m afraid to ask about the energy footprint. But what the heck, what do we know about it?
Is ironic the word for OP being a repost bot? Or is it just expected at this point?
How do you know? Just curious.
Post history and seeing the same username every day. Plus they rarely every respond to questions and comments when they post and what they respond with is generic.
Maybe it's the bot of the guy who thought the only way to save the threadiverse is by having bots repost almost everything from Reddit.
What's the purpose of doing this as a bot but not declaring the account as a bot account? On other sites, they do it for karma farming, but that doesn't really apply here, right?
Probably just another layer of analytics for engagement bait in other spaces. They can also copy top comments and train LLMs and whatever else every bad actor does to every internet comment site now. They are like a slime mold and grow toward any source of nutrition except it's an n-dimensional maze and the nutrition is influencing public opinion and scamming people.
Shit, sounds like me.
Basic bitch detected
In other words, you don't really know - not that there's anything wrong with that. Opinions and "it's obvious" are the social media standard for "fact".
That user has a history of reposting reddit content and the format and pattern of posts are obviously not human. All of its posts are originally from reddit. A simple search of its posts will show you they are copied word for word from an older reddit post. What more evidence do you need?
I see consistent behavior, but "obviously not human" is an opinion, not evidence. It could be a human who wants to be a frequent poster but lacks originality.
I prefer to think of it as being observant and investigating but to each their own. OP has been called out on almost every post and never defended themselves. Could be a human who doesn't check the replies but either way, the behavior is the same.
If you see the same username every day, that means you are on every day.... only a spy would do that.
Suspected Chinese agent, possibly Russian
Yeah I don't know a single person who gets on the internet every day. I'm so uNiQuE and special!
I've never even been on the internet
Nah those people complaining are reddit agents. Trying to ruin lemmy
lol not even a little. I'm trying to grow my lemmy communities. I have no problem with it being a bot, that's why I haven't blocked it. My issue is that it's not declared as a bot. Several times I've found myself asking further questions to just realize, it's that same guy who posted a "my super cool thing" five minutes ago and I won't get a response to my question. There's no way he has a jurrasic park themed turtle sanctuary in addition to the other 50 sweet things in his house/yard/town/
Comments accusing critics of being "Reddit Agents" are an indicator of a specific spammer. They are a proven operator of LLM-driven spambots. Two weeks ago one of their alts, [email protected], left their prompt in the title and body of a post.
Meh. Ya welcome for content.
Accusing people of spamming when they given you content is an indication of a reddit agent that intentionally conflate those ideas with spam.
You are a spammer. You contribute nothing and drown out real users.
lol what users - there is 1 post a week otherwise. each of those posts are reposts from somehwere else - reddit, twiter, facebook . itsmemes bro - grow up
I'd rather have 1 post a week (it's more than that, but whatever) than someone like you who contributes nothing filling my feed with bullshit. You should just go back to reddit if you want the reddit experience.
bruh there is enought content without u reposting, in fact i probably gona just block ur and miss nothing.
There's plenty of documented evidence of alt bots from moderators. Also, the lack of source link is a key factor in why people are interpreting your post that way.
As I told you on your other account, you are the one bringing reddit into the threadiverse.
People might believe you if you provided the source or responded to anything other than to argue and dip
Look at what they do there's absolutely nobody posting on lemmy and they're trying to ban the only active contributor.
who this is benefit clearly reddit.
They are not just complainers, they are provocateurs attempting to decontent free and open platforms
You are not the only active contributor, in fact, you don't contribute anything of value, so drop that narcissistic line of thinking.
You are the one bringing reddit here where it is unwelcome.
we are all reddit refugees bro. nono - I take reddit content and share with those in need. im a lemmy content jezus
There's more of that narcissistic attitude. You're a reddit content spammer, nothing more.
Literally people are only complaining because you post everything as "I did this I did that" no one would give a fuck if you just said you reposted it. But people want to have a discussion and think you actually did this stuff and get disappointed that no one ever answers them.
You're taking the entire discussion portion out of it.
yeah im genuinely trying not to post those. need to improve that setup. not super happy this post got posted I should probably remove it
We can ruin our own instances thank you very much.
You know, I wonder if the AI agents are willing to open random zip files they find on websites, and I'm further curious if they're smart enough to avoid a zip bomb.
Can follow JWZ for practical experience on this kind of thing - apparently it is getting so bad that even opening a connection to deliver the zip bombs is getting infeasible now.
You can serve zip bombs as web pages since most crawlers support gzip encoding.
And yes it's very effective ;)
No, you didn’t.
Yeah I have OP listed as "repost bot" so if I see something cool I can go check somewhere else for the info.
How do you know?
Look at their profile. 460 posts, 45 comments, in just 1 month. If they aren't automating their posts they need to go touch grass.
An overwhelming number of their posts have titles like "I made this thing", but are clearly just popular posts ripped straight from Reddit.
I also have them tagged as a repost bot. I'm not blocking them, but don't bother trying to engage like the content is somehow organic or original.
Yeah, that's my issue. Like some stuff is cool, I want to ask follow up questions. But OP didn't make or create any of the things they're posting so they'll never know the answer. Which is fine, if you link to the original source. I understand that sometimes you can't link the original source but like, be upfront. I repost things from reddit in ![email protected]. But I do it by hand and I link back to the original locations in case people want more information or to see the original source.
Ah ok, thanks. How do you tag users?
Certain apps can do it, such as Summit or Boost. I believe it's also built into Piefed.
Voyager as well
You can find the original post on Reddit, somebody has already linked the original post down the thread. This is typical of this user and a few others like sanitation who have become notorious for using Reddit repost bots many times with errors in the repost like not having all of the image or not having any of the post body.
It’s very annoying.
Also interested in how you know. Just commenting to get notificated (:
Post quantities are a big indicator. A stronger indicator in this case is that their only comment on this post is accusing people of being "Reddit Agents". That points to a specific spambot operator with multiple alts that refuses to declare any of them as bots. They had a malfunction two weeks ago that left their LLM prompt in a post.
You can also usually just look up the top posts on Reddit via redlib and find the word for word post there, if you really wanted to be sure.
Thank you very much :)
What is this? It's really freaking me out.
So what you're implying is this should be implemented in every website in both follow/not follow just to waste their money?
[Everyone liked this.]
I wonder if it's possible to trap bots like this and use them to mine crypto.
I'm sure it might be possible but whoever would be doing this wouldn't let their secret out.
It's not. The bot just gets a copy of the website, looks for links, and then sends a request to the server to get those subdomains. Highly unlikely that there is a vulnerability that let's you execute arbitrary code, which would be what you'd need to mine crypto.
Quick everyone, to AI for a "solution" /s.
Iocane is software designed to do this
Apparently some bot programmers are assholes who ignore
rel="nofollow".robots.txt only keeps the honest robots out
Is it possible to have the bots recursively give themselves instructions and birth child instances of themselves that do the same thing? Because if it's ai bots, that could absolutely be maliciously exploited.
Can anyone explain what is happening behind the scenes with the "room creation"?? That sounds intriguing. I understand OP is a bot but, is anything described here an actual way of trapping crawlers? How are the crawlers fooled by any of this?
He placed an invisible link on his website. Only visible by reading the page content (html). Then the bots followed the link. This link lead to a page with 5 links (door) four links are dead and one leads to another page (level) with again 5 links.
I guess the links and pages are generated on the go. So the bots and crawlers may follow the links forever of they like.
I wonder if pages have to be generated individually to appear legit to the crawlers, or if the same contents can be served as different links over and over... if I knew more about how this stuff works I'd try it myself hah.
Most crawlers don't care - they're purely downloading. Most garbage will also be filtered out before training, and generating plausible garbage is expensive - not really worth the trouble. What you can do with the garbage, is that you can place unique identifiers in the links you serve, so when a crawler that you can't recognize otherwise comes visiting a poisoned URL, you can firewall it off. This works because the crawlers use a queue: they get a list of URLs to visit, they download them, and later on, the URLs from those get extracted, and crawlers will visit those URLs.
So if you manage to trap a bot, and overwhelm its queue with poisoned URLs, you can also catch bots that you wouldn't be able to easily identify otherwise. And that is why serving an endless maze of garbage is so very useful. Because it lets you catch stuff like headless chromes operating through residential proxies: because those too, follow a queue.
As some other users have already mentioned it, have a look at this project anyway: https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/
It gives much more bloated information for a crawler than I expected. But sounds quite fun to host.
Throw in a few of them torture chambers and make it a proper dungeon >:)
We already got one and people are crying their eyes out because poor bots. https://www.404media.co/someone-torturing-llms-in-a-robot-prison-has-triggered-the-dumbest-debate-in-ai-yet/
Yeah but I thought maybe we could add it from the repo somehow so if the bot got extra lost going through doors it wasn't supposed to look behind, that it got in trouble and got a spanking
"You" did no such thing.
Account blocked. Bot, or not.
It's ironic that you advertise yourself as having "time to lose" but you don't have "time to replace 1st person pronouns with more accurate 3rd person ones."
Need a digital Minotaur in these labyrinths
This was a fun story. I masturbated. I did not finish, nor did I enjoy myself. At the same time, I have procured a thought sapling about slime molds, specifically how a specialized biological system could outperform a binary computer. This triggers a thought about quantum computing being better at logistics but shit at counting, for example. Information density directly correlates with the degree of topological entanglement, which means the möbiation of entanglement is itself the mechanism to not just encode additional density of information, but this information encoded can be parsed differently by different systems, to thus allow a multivariable set of instructions to exist in the same space. Thank you, I will take my Nobel Prize as a suppository.
Big if true
Oh, I definitely masturbated, that's always a "given" in my axiomatic habberdance. That's the word my brain did done conjure just now thakely.
Extremely good content! Very interesting. Would love to see more!
Can’t see the other comment replies to you for some reason, but the irony is that the OP you’re replying to is a bot that scrapes Reddit for content with a vibe coded extension.
Here’s the original post in /r/interestingasfuck that was removed by mods for some reason.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1wypha0/removed_by_moderator/
I don't know what's real anymore!!
I guess the bot preserved the post, then?
Still, would be better if the original was properly credited...
Yeah I guess that’s the upside. Honestly I would have no problem with what he’s doing if he changed a couple things.
If his accounts (he’s got a bunch) were clearly marked as bots, but I’m sure he doesn’t want to because then you’ll see how much bot generated content he moves over. But like there’s already RSS feed type bots that repost content from Reddit and even include a link back to the original. Not that I’d want to push people over there, but you’re not getting actual comment engagement on a bot post.
If he just changed the titles so he’s not constantly posting “I did x” content when no he didn’t. “I did x” posts like this or HistoryMeme type posts spark conversation that will end up being one sided because you’ll never get a reply from the bot.
Posted a little fucking less. Look on the front page and see how many posts are coming from Sanitation, Time2Loose, Mustachious_Grumpus, Grumpus_Maximus, OldManAlex, and others he has. All Reddit repost bot accounts. It’s just inorganic. Same reason people hate that shit on Reddit.
Edit: apparently he’s already doing that as well under the username liquorice which IS marked as a bot using the same vibe coded extension. Only then he goes and makes 8+ other account not marked as bots to cover up how much bot posted shit is being pulled over from Reddit.
Do the RSS feed bots also repost comments? Because I think something like that would be nice to have (kinda like bridging Discord to Stoat), just preferably implemented by instance runners and marked and credited accordingly.
They do not. Just the links. I think if it were to copy the comments it would be harmful to the community as you’d essentially be looking at a one-sided conversation. People could reply but you’d never get an answer back. I mean, if the source is linked in the description you could always just visit the original and read through them.
I'd guess that would depend on whether the link was one-way or two-way (with a bot posting fedi comments back to Reddit).
And yes, a one-way bridge would have its drawbacks, but I'd argue that this would still be a step up from just reposting the post, and incentivise making a Lemmy/Piefed account.
It's a bot reposting content from reddit.
Fuck really? :'(
FYI https://piefed.social/ recently added a filter for them
https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/2457619/reposter-feature
Is this why porn is so good now?
Where are you getting your porn from, 'cause between ID-checking roadblocks and the fact that no can seem to make a decent search engine anymore, I've never had a more difficult time trying to find good porn. Please, share with me your secrets (and no, I am never going to give my ID to a porn site!)
Yandex.
Isn't Yandex a Russian search engine? I meant a porntube site. That way I can create an account and have a recommendation algorithm.
You need an account to jerk off?
Have you ever tried to watch porn without an account before? It's like watching YouTube without one. It's the Wild West, and every video sucks. That's the problem I'm having. Nobody makes a good porn site with a good search function anymore.
I'm literally doing as we speak.
Well you're not the person who can help me, then. Clearly your needs are less specific than mine.
That's fine, I need to take a break from porn anyway.
can you turn this into a WP plug-in?
please?
edit: I see now that this is a repost bot agcount. But hey, maybe someone else can design a plugin.
Look up "tarpit" plug ins, most of this is ready to use. I see quite a few when I search, but I'm not familiar with the wordpress world, so can't really recommend one or the other.
I appreciate the lead. Thank you
Thank you for your service!
Ironic how this infographic is AI-generated.
How do you know this?
Claude has a very recognizable style of web design and graphics it creates.
It also loves to spam tiny little explanations in certain places with punchy, short sentences. ("Deepest room reached, per bot name. Bots: 1,029,000 requests. Humans: 193,000 page views.", "412,057 of them in a single day. They never found a button, because there isn't one.")
https://op.tngl.io/every-fucking-website/ does this look familiar?
You hid the link? Really?