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Apparently dead internet theory is real - FOSS hammered with bots, and latest proof-of-work anti-bot captchas reject 97% of traffic as bots

submitted by aleleopathic to whatever 2 monthsMar 26, 2025 19:20:15 ago (+4/-0)     (thelibre.news)

https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/

Excerpt:

As an example, here's Jonathan Corbet, who runs the FOSS news source LWN, warns users that the website might be "occasionally sluggish"… due to DDoS from AI scraper bots. He claims that "only a small fraction of our traffic is serving actual human readers", and at some point, the bots "decides to hit us from hundreds of IP addresses at once. [..] They don't identify themselves as bots, and robots.txt is the only thing they don't read off the site".

Over Mastodon, one GNOME sysadmin, Bart Piotrowski, kindly shared some numbers to let people fully understand the scope of the problem. According to him, in around two hours and a half they received 81k total requests, and out of those only 3% passed Anubi's proof of work, hinting at 97% of the traffic being bots – an insane number!


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