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AI companies are violating a basic social contract of the web and and ignoring robots.txt
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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robots.txt is purely textual; you can't run JavaScript or log anything. Plus, one who doesn't intend to follow robots.txt wouldn't query it.
If it doesn't get queried that's the fault of the webscraper. You don't need JS built into the robots.txt file either. Just add some line like:
Any client that hits that page (and maybe doesn't pass a captcha check) gets banned. Or even better, they get a long stream of nonsense.
server {
name herebedragons.example.com; root /dev/random;
}
I wonder if Nginx would just load random into memory until the kernel OOM kills it.