@altruios Hi, author of Nepenthes here.

I respect your discomfort, but honestly I'm angry enough about their behavior I want to see them burn. There's been far too much of this:

https://mastodon.social/@khobochka/113724300122190730

I cannot trust traffic to my site to be harmless, so I don't see any reason why something connecting to every site on the internet should be able to trust the site isn't harmful.

@tante

*KICKS DOOR DOWN*

Hey everyone! Hate AI web crawlers? Have some spare CPU cycles you want to use to punish them?

Meet Nepenthes!

https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes

This little guy runs nicely on low power hardware, and generates an infinite maze of what appear to be static files with no exit links. Web crawlers will merrily hop right in and just .... get stuck in there! Optional randomized delay to waste their time and conserve your CPU, optional markovbabble to poison large language models.

More of this energy in 2025 please.