We’ve had this thing hammering our servers. The scraper uses randomized user-agents browser/OS combinations and comes from a number of distinct IP ranges in different datacenters around the world, but all the IPs track back to Bytedance.
This is fine. I support archiving the Internet.
It kinda drives me crazy how normalized anti-scraping rhetoric is. There is nothing wrong with (rate limited) scraping
The only bots we need to worry about are the ones that POST, not the ones that GET
I had to block ByteSpider at work because it can’t even parse HTML correctly and just hammers the same page and accounts to sometimes 80% of the traffic hitting a customer’s site and taking it down.
The big problem with AI scrapers is unlike Google and traditional search engines, they just scrape so aggressively. Even if it’s all GETs, they hit years old content that’s not cached and use up the majority of the CPU time on the web servers.
Scraping is okay, using up a whole 8 vCPU instance for days to feed AI models is not. They even actively use dozens of IPs to bypass the rate limits too, so theyre basically DDoS’ing whoever they scrape with no fucks given. I’ve been woken up by the pager way too often due to ByteSpider.
My next step is rewriting all the content with GPT-2 and serving it to bots so their models collapse.
Bullshit. This bot doesn’t identify itself as a bot and doesn’t rate limit itself to anything that would be an appropriate amount. We were seeing more traffic from this thing that all other crawlers combined.
Bytedance ain’t looking to build an archival tool. This is to train gen AI models.
It’s illegal when a regular person steals something, but it’s innovation and courage, when a huge corporation steals something. Interesting how that works
Honestly it’s fucking angering. So much regulation and geo-restrictions and licensing schemes… but it’s cool that there are data brokers, and shit like this. On top of it all Chrome screwing us with manifest v3 and killing ad blocking on chrome. It’s already in canary build.
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS SPECIES?!
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS SPECIES?!
Yes.
Google are actually doing really awesome work with manifest v3. A pimp needs to smack their b1tches around every once in a while to remind them who’s boss.
how’s that Google dick tasting?
I’m glad there are at least some people enjoying this, you know being a bitch to big corps.
Any regular person can scrape and use public data for AI use, it’s not illegal for companies or individuals and it shouldn’t be.
proceeds to download the entirety of one piece to train an AI
Aaron Schwartz killed himself over punishments for less
Worse punishments. For far less.
They’re not stealing your data, they’re pirating it.
They’re not pirating it. They’re collecting it.
They’re not collecting it. They’re archiving it.
Oh, like the way back machine?
No, that’s stealing /s
Is the problem that wayback machine isn’t profiting from it?
It’s not so much the lack of profits, more like the lack of kickbacks.
Also it doesn’t respect
robots.txt(the file that tells bots whether or not a given page can be accessed) unlike most AI scrapping bots.My personal website that primarily functions as a front end to my home server has been getting BEAT by these stupid web scrapers. Every couple of days the server is unusable because some web scraper demanded every single possible page and crashed the damn thing
most
I doubt that…
People would be able to tell from the traffic on their websites.
Not surprising that Bytedance would want to gobble up every bit of data they can as fast as possible.
Google’s mission statement was originally something about controlling the world’s data. If Google has competition, that might be a good thing?
Yeah, but we were hoping for competition that wasn’t worse than google…
What makes you think they’re worse than Google?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ByteDance
Mostly what they have said and done, but also largely what they intend to continue saying and doing.
Can you distill it down for me?
It’s the same old Yankee speech: “is chinese so must be really bad”. They’re definitely no worse than google or facebook.
They come from an environment where the government actively encourages and sometimes funds stealing copyrighted information couched in a strong history of disregard for human rights. I’m not defending Google, and yes the US government has given them leeway, but if there is the potential for something worse than Google - Bytedance is it.
Is there a link for non-subscribers?
They’re too late, there’s going to be way too much AI generated garbage in their data and so many social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter have already taken measures to curb scrapers.
Like those platforms aren’t already full of AI garbage as well. Training new models will require a cut-off date before the genie was let out of the bottle.
I think that’s the “25-times faster” bit. They seem to be in a hurry to collect as much human-generated data as possible.
How does it know what is and isn’t?
Uh oh.
