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Grab a chai latté or an americano and have a seat at the Dialup Cybercafé. Our iMac G3's sport 56Kbaud modems, Internet Explorer 4, and your choice of tangerine, strawberry, grape, blueberry and lime.

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Should you be wondering why @LWN #LWN is occasionally sluggish... since the new year, the DDOS onslaughts from AI-scraper bots has picked up considerably. Only a small fraction of our traffic is serving actual human readers at this point. At times, some bot decides to hit us from hundreds of IP addresses at once, clogging the works. They don't identify themselves as bots, and robots.txt is the only thing they *don't* read off the site.

This is beyond unsustainable. We are going to have to put time into deploying some sort of active defenses just to keep the site online. I think I'd even rather be writing about accounting systems than dealing with this crap. And it's not just us, of course; this behavior is going to wreck the net even more than it's already wrecked.

Happy new year :)
vga256

@corbet @LWN i'm not sure if you've already got a strategy for dealing with the scrapers already in mind, but if not -

dialup.cafe's running on nginx, and this has worked well for me so far:
rknight.me/blog/blocking-bots-

an apache translation of that using .htaccess would be possible as well.

rknight.meBlocking Bots with NginxHow I've automated updating the bot list to block access to my site