A never-ending maze would mean the scrapers just hammer our servers forever. Better to lead them into a honeypot and automatically ban their IP. Like PieFed does.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What about a maze that adds a few hundred ms to the response time with each request, so the load gets less the longer it's trapped?

[–] rimu@piefed.social 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I haven't tried to make something like that. I think it'd be hard to do that without also exhausting our resources too.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

Ah, that makes sense

[–] TheBat@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

A never-ending maze would mean the scrapers just hammer our servers forever.

Is that how tarpitting works? I didn't know.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 18 points 2 days ago

There are a lot of strategies. afaik a tar pit tries to waste the attacker's resources by delaying our responses to their traffic? A honey pot tries to funnel bot traffic towards a place which only bots would go to. Once they go there you know they're a bot and they can be banned.

[–] Deceptichum@quokk.au 5 points 2 days ago

Sadly that only works for scrapers, content engaging bots are immune to it.

[–] pimento64@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

So just find scrapers and bot farm owners IRL and burn down their houses, easy