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Codeberg: army of AI crawlers are extremely slowing us; AI crawlers learned how to solve the Anubis challenges.
(infosec.pub)
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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Write TOS that state that crawlers automatically accept a service fee and then send invoices to every crawler owner.
Huawei is Chinese. There's literally zero chance a European company like Codeberg is going to successfully collect from a company in China over a TOS violation.
It's not even a company. It's a non-profit "eingetragener Verein". They have very limited resources, especially money because they purely live on membership fees and donations.
True, but it can help limit the European AI scrapers too
I really doubt it. Lawsuits are expensive, and proving responsibility is difficult, since plausible deniability is easy. All scrapers need to do is use shared IPs (e.g. cloud providers), preferably owned by a company in a different legal jurisdiction. That could be the case here: a European company could be using Huawei Cloud to mask the source of their traffic.
Simple: just charge the cloud provider.
Once that gets strong enough they'll start placing terms against scraping in their TOS.
And then they just throw it in the bin because there was never a contract between you and them. What to do then? Sue Microsoft, Amazon and Google
I'm sure Codeberg, a German non-profit Verein, has time and money to do that 🤣.
Sure but that's a whole different part of the system. Society as a whole has to change (some guillotines would help) and no matter how cool Codeberg is, they can't do all that on their own.
In the meantime, what the elites visibly respond to and that is more readily accessible is monetary costs. Make it costly (operationally or legally) to scrape sites, and they'll stop if at least to whine.
They typically don't include a billing address in the User Agent when crawling 🤣
That's a technicality. The billing address can be discovered for a nominal fee as well.
I'm sure it can't, especially for foreign IP addresses, VPNs, and a ton of other situations. Even if directly connect to the internet just via your ISP, many countries in Europe (don't know about US) have laws that would require you to have very good reasons and a court order to get the info you need from the ISP - for a single(!) case.
If it would be possible to simply get the address of all digital visitors, we wouldn't have to develop all this anti scrape tech and just sue them.
Cloudflare had a similar idea: Introducing pay per crawl: Enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access