Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will “eat just about anything that finds its way inside.”
Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It’s not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an “infinite maze” of static files with no exit links, where they “get stuck” and “thrash around” for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That’s likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn.
Fair.
Which is a shame, tbh. We had far better content, when people had to work to create good content, that others wanted, and got passed around.
ie, in school, before search engines, we all knew about Whitehouse.com… We all knew the sites that had the info we wanted/needed at the time.
In fact, I’d argue the downfall of the web as an actual useful tool came about once search engines automatically started indexing, rather than submitting site maps to a page like OpenDirectory to have your site cataloged, indexed, and sorted into appropriate categories by a human.
Because once people started working on “gaming algos” rather than “Making super good content”, the internet just became the new “Malls” where you weren’t expected to learn, you were just expected to buy.
I liked it back when link aggregators were the go-to for discovery. You could have sites that were real gems that were just tucked away.
I think the indexing started out ok. Counting backlinks and using that as a ranking was pretty genius, right up until people realized they could game the system, then google realized that artificially screwing with their own system was worth money, then the used ads to modify ranking.
ads to modify discoverability the death of free internet