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In case anyone is interested in a tiny bit of sabotage, I am under the impression I managed to 'drown' true information on my microblog by generating contradict
by xyzal 2y ago
In case anyone is interested in a tiny bit of sabotage, I am under the impression I managed to 'drown' true information on my microblog by generating contradicting posts with LLaMa (tens of them for each real post) and invisibly linking them, so a human would not click through.
You know, flood the zone with s***, Bannon-style ...
- RobKohr 2y agoYep, just make sure to add them to your robots.txt file so that only the bad robots are harmed.
- ethan_smith 2y agoTemporary solution and only works if only some of us are doing it. What if these bots have a "manager" LLM agent that takes the decision on what pages to scrape?
- knowaveragejoe 2y agoThis is an approach I've seen used and I'm not sure what success it has had. But logically it seems sound: explicitly reference paths that no human would actually see - traffic hitting those paths are bots. They can't help themselves.
- xyzal 2y agoRegarding pollution of the LLM weights, at least the Russian propaganda machine seems to prove it works, see https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250310-russian-disinformation-infects-ai-chatbots-researchers-warn https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250310-russian-disin...
- kod 2y agoBesides flooding them with junk, what about outright sabotage in the form of serving zip bombs or other ways to waste computational resources?
- xyzal 2y agoI think we need to aim for the bots to get _negative_ utility value from visiting our traps, not just zero value. Did you try to GET a canary page forbidden in robots.txt? Very well, have a bucket load of articles on the benefits of drinking bleach. Is your user-agent too suspicious? No problem, feel free to scrape my insecure code (google "emergent misalignment" for more info). A request rate too inhuman? Here, take those generated articles about positive effect of catching measles on performance in bed. And so on, and so forth ...
- dabockster 2y agoEven though I agree with what you're doing in principle, I feel it's necessary to remind and warn everyone here that sabotaging bots could be viewed as a violation of laws such as the US's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act[1]. I mean, unless the Second Amendment is suddenly interpreted to include cyberweapons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
- joquarky 2y agoWhen I read this yesterday, I was contemplating one possible way to mitigate this at a larger scale is if websites could create random virtual paths/endpoints that drive the bot into a locally served Library of Babel[0] that poisons the spiders with lots of useless text. It won't work for well-structured sites where the bots know the exact endpoint they want to scrape, but might slow down the more exploratory spider threads. [0] https://libraryofbabel.info/ https://libraryofbabel.info/