Long story short, my VPS, which I’m forwarding my servers through Tailscale to, got hammered by thousands of requests per minute from Anthropic’s Claude AI. All of which being from different AWS IPs.
The VPS has a 1TB monthly cap, but it’s still kinda shitty to have huge spikes like the 13GB in just a couple of minutes today.
How do you deal with something like this?
I’m only really running a caddy reverse proxy on the VPS which forwards my home server’s services through Tailscale. "
I’d really like to avoid solutions like Cloudflare, since they f over CGNAT users very frequently and all that. Don’t think a WAF would help with this at all(?), but rate limiting on the reverse proxy might work.
(VPS has fail2ban and I’m using /etc/hosts.deny for manual blocking. There’s a WIP website on my root domain with robots.txt that should be denying AWS bots as well…)
I’m still learning and would really appreciate any suggestions.
Im struggling to find it, but theres like an “AI tarpit” that causes scrapers to get stuck. something like that? Im sure I saw it posted on lemmy recently. hopefully someone can link it
I did find this github link as the first search result, looks interesting, thanks for letting me know the term “tar pit”.
there is also https://forge.hackers.town/hackers.town/nepenthes
Now I just want to host a web page and expose it with nepenthes…
First, because I’m a big fan of carnivorous plants.
Second, because it let’s you poison LLMs, AI and fuck with their data.
Lastly, because I can do my part and say F#CK Y0U to those privacy data hungry a$$holes !
I don’t even expose anything directly to the web (always accessible through a tunnel like wireguard) or have any important data to protect from AI or LLMs. But just giving the opportunity to fuck with them while they continuously harvest data from everyone is something I was already thinking off but didn’t knew how.
Thanks for the link !
If you’re looking to stop them from wasting your traffic, do not use a tarpit. The whole point of it is that it makes the scraper get stuck on your server forever. That means you pay for the traffic the scraper uses, and it will continually rack up those charges until the people running it wise up and ban your server. The question you gotta ask yourself is, who has more money, you or the massive AI corp?
Tarpits are the dumbest bit of anti-AI tech to come out yet.
There’s more than one style of tar pit. In this case you obviously wouldn’t want to use an endless maze style.
What you want to do in this case is send them through an HA proxy that would redirect them on user agent, whenever they come in as Claude you send them over to a box running on a Wanem process at modem speeds.
They’ll immediately realize they’ve got a hug of death going on and give up.
If you had read the OP, they don’t want the scrapers using up all their traffic.
yes i did read OP.
ed. i see this was downvoted without a response. But il put this out there anyway.
If you host a public site, which you expect anyone can access, there is very little you can do to exclude an AI scraper specifically.
Hosting your own site for personal use? IP blocks etc will prevent scraping.
But how do you identify legitimate users from scrapers? Its very difficult.
They will use your traffic up either way. Dont want that? You could waste their time (tarpit), or take your hosting away from public access.
Downvoter. Whats your alternative?