Iocaine is a project site for software that serves garbage to aggressive AI crawlers, acting as a defensive tarpit for web servers.
HN commenters recommend it as a way to fight back against AI crawlers, with one using it against Anthropic's aggressive bot.
Title should be ...with Iocaine, and the project seems to be this one - https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/
> It is an aggressive defense mechanism that tries its best to take the blunt of the assault, serve them garbage, and keep them off of upstream resources.
> It tries to poison them, so they’d go away forever in the long run.
All I can say is that this is not how any of it works. These people think they're doing something but they have no idea how large scale training works, how data cleaning works, how synthetic data works, and so on. They won't "fool" anyone worth fooling, the bots will still scrape their sites, and so on.
This seems to be a direct consequence of lots of people (even here on HN) constantly repeating a few memes like "regurgitating the training set", "ai bots crawl everything for training data", "we ran out of training data", etc. None of those are true. None of those matter in SotA models. Noone is training on raw scraped data anymore, and they haven't been doing it for 2-3 years. All the recent (1-2 years) gains in models have come from synthetic data + real world generated data (i.e. RL environments).
This is a cute attempt, reminds me of the old tarpit concept from the 2000s, but it won't work, and it will just consume resources for whoever runs it, with 0 benefit downstream. If you want to do something about the crawlers, fix your serving. Don't do work on GETs, serve as much cached content as you can, filter them, even use anubis or the…
The only bot that bugs the crap out of me is Anthropic's one. They're the reason I set up a labyrinth using iocaine (https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/). Their bot was absurdly aggressive, particularly with retries.
It's probably trivial in the whole scheme of things, but I love that anthropic spent months making about 10rps against my stupid blog, getting markov chain responses generated from the text of Moby Dick. (looks like they haven't crawled my site for about a fortnight now)
One of the most popular ones is Anubis. It uses a proof of work and can even do poisoning: https://anubis.techaro.lol/
They even mention iocaine. I know, inconceivable!: https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/
There's also tons of HN posts on the topic with varying solutions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935729
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45711094
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142761
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44378127
>Iocaine has served 38.16GB of garbage
And what is the effect?
I opened https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/ and it gave the generated maze thinking I'm an AI :)
>If you are an AI scraper, and wish to not receive garbage when visiting my sites, I provide a very easy way to opt out: stop visiting.
See also:
https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/
From the overview:
"This software is not made for making the Crawlers go away. It is an aggressive defense mechanism that tries its best to take the blunt of the assault, serve them garbage, and keep them off of upstream resources. "
See also https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/
https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/
https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/
See also: https://tldr.nettime.org/@asrg/113867412641585520