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braden_e

18 karma · joined March 25, 2011

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braden_e··on AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending content hunger
There is a very large scale crawler that uses random valid user agents and a staggeringly large pool of ips. I first noticed it because a lot of traffic was coming from Brazil and "HostRoyale" (asn 203020). They send only a few requests a day from each ip so rate limiting is not useful.

I run a honeypot that generates urls with the source IP so I am pretty confident it is all one bot, in the past 48 hours I have had over 200,000 ips hit the honeypot.

I am pretty sure this is Bytedance, they occasionally hit these tagged honeypot urls with their normal user agent and their usual .sg datacenter.

braden_e··on How we blocked TikTok's Bytespider bot and cut our bandwidth by 80%
ClaudeBot (second worst crawler) and GPTBot are the only ones that identify themselves in an obvious way. The rest I am blocking by network. I assume AI when the crawler is very aggressively downloading images - it must be costing them an absolute fortune!
braden_e··on How we blocked TikTok's Bytespider bot and cut our bandwidth by 80%
This is the worst behaved bot I have ever seen, I suspect it is AI related. I recently decided to block all the AI crawlers - unlike search engines I get nothing from them.
braden_e··on The Stack Exchange Architecture
Other than microsoft themselves: myspace is still fairly huge but probably a mixed stack. Plentyoffish is up there too - http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture