I was reading the reddit thread on Claude AI crawlers effectively DDOSing Linux Mint forums https://libreddit.lunar.icu/r/linux/comments/1ceco4f/claude_ai_name_and_shame/
and I wanted to block all ai crawlers from my selfhosted stuff.
I don’t trust crawlers to respect the Robots.txt but you can get one here: https://darkvisitors.com/
Since I use Caddy as a Server, I generated a directive that blocks them based on their useragent. The content of the regex basically comes from darkvisitors.
Sidenote - there is a module for blocking crawlers as well, but it seemed overkill for me https://github.com/Xumeiquer/nobots
For anybody who is interested, here is the block_ai_crawlers.conf I wrote.
(blockAiCrawlers) {
@blockAiCrawlers {
header_regexp User-Agent "(?i)(Bytespider|CCBot|Diffbot|FacebookBot|Google-Extended|GPTBot|omgili|anthropic-ai|Claude-Web|ClaudeBot|cohere-ai)"
}
handle @blockAiCrawlers {
abort
}
}
# Usage:
# 1. Place this file next to your Caddyfile
# 2. Edit your Caddyfile as in the example below
#
# ```
# import block_ai_crawlers.conf
#
# www.mywebsite.com {
# import blockAiCrawlers
# reverse_proxy * localhost:3000
# }
# ```
I just want you to know that was an amazing read, was actually thinking “It gets worse? Oh it does. Oh, IT GETS EVEN WORSE?”
In dark mode, the anchor tags are difficult to read. They’re dark blue on a dark background. Perhaps consider something with a much higher contrast?
Apart from that, nice idea - I’m going to deploy the zipbomb today!
I really like your site’s color scheme, fonts, and overall aesthetics. Very nice!
I’m a fan of hellpotting them.
From your recommendation, I found a related project pandoras_pot that I am able to run in a Docker container, and seems to run more efficiently on my Pi home server. I now use it in my Caddyfile to redirect a number of fake subdomains and paths that are likely to be found by a malicious bot (of course all are excluded in my robots.txt for bots that actually respect it). Thanks for the recommendation!
We should do more than block them, they need to be teergrubed.
Thats an easy modification. Just redirect or reverse proxy to the tarpit instead of abort .
I was even thinking about an infinitely linked data-poisoned html document, but there seemed to be no ready made project that can generate one at the moment. (No published data-poisoning techniques for plain text at all afaik. But there is one for images.)
Ultimately I decided to just abort the connection as I don’t want my servers to waste traffic or CPU cycles.
Huh, looks like the post in r/linux got removed for not being relevant.
What a joke.
