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.

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[–] 147 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Designing impossible mazes for AI to get lost in as a matter of civil defense? What a fucking world we live in…

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  • [–] 132 points 4 days ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 67 points 4 days ago (38 children)

    Is ironic the word for OP being a repost bot? Or is it just expected at this point?

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    [–] 10 points 3 days ago

    Need a digital Minotaur in these labyrinths

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  • [–] 9 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 59 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    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.

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    [–] 33 points 4 days ago (4 children)

    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.]

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    I wonder if it's possible to trap bots like this and use them to mine crypto.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 20 points 4 days ago

    Iocane is software designed to do this

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  • [–] 43 points 4 days ago (13 children)
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    [–] 17 points 4 days ago

    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.

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  • [–] 16 points 4 days ago (3 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 28 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 18 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    Apparently some bot programmers are assholes who ignore rel="nofollow".

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  • [–] 11 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    "You" did no such thing.

    Account blocked. Bot, or not.

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    [–] 11 points 4 days ago

    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."

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