Ask Lemmy

I've been following the struggle of bearblog developer to manage the current war between bot scrapers and people who are trying to keep a safe and human oriented internet. What is lemmy doing about bot scrapers?

Some context from bearblog dev

The great scrape

https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-great-scrape/

LLMs feed on data. Vast quantities of text are needed to train these models, which are in turn receiving valuations in the billions. This data is scraped from the broader internet, from blogs, websites, and forums, without the author's permission and all content being opt-in by default.

Needless to say, this is unethical. But as Meta has proven, it's much easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. It is unlikely they will be ordered to "un-train" their next generation models due to some copyright complaints.

Aggressive bots ruined my weekend

https://herman.bearblog.dev/agressive-bots/

It's more dangerous than ever to self-host, since simple mistakes in configurations will likely be found and exploited. In the last 24 hours I've blocked close to 2 million malicious requests across several hundred blogs.

What's wild is that these scrapers rotate through thousands of IP addresses during their scrapes, which leads me to suspect that the requests are being tunnelled through apps on mobile devices, since the ASNs tend to be cellular networks. I'm still speculating here, but I think app developers have found another way to monetise their apps by offering them for free, and selling tunnel access to scrapers