I stumbled upon a bot detection page generated by anubis after clicking one too many hyperlinks in a robotic way probably. The page it rendered was cute and enticingly hyperlinked. An hour later? I found myself reading its docuumentation as if my life depended on it and it was my only goal. I came across the entry "dataset poisoning" and thought it did a great job at exxplaining the concept to a layperson. L-ai-person, l-ai-ke me...
Dataset poisoning
Anubis offers the ability to participate in dataset poisoning attacks similar to what iocaine and other similar tools offer. Currently this is in a preview state where a lot of details are hard-coded in order to test the viability of this approach.
In essence, when Anubis challenge and error pages are rendered they include a small bit of HTML code that browsers will ignore but scrapers will interpret as a link to ingest. This will then create a small forest of recursive nothing pages that are designed according to the following principles:
These pages are cheap to render, rendering in at most ten milliseconds on decently specced hardware. These pages are vacuous, meaning that they essentially are devoid of content such that a human would find it odd and click away, but a scraper would not be able to know that and would continue through the forest. These pages are fairly large so that scrapers don't think that the pages are error pages or are otherwise devoid of content. These pages are fully self-contained so that they load fast without incurring additional load from resource fetches. In this limited preview state, Anubis generates pages using spintax. Spintax is a syntax that is used to create different variants of utterances for use in marketing messages and email spam that evades word filtering. In its current form, Anubis' dataset poisoning has AI generated spintax that generates vapid LinkedIn posts with some western occultism thrown in for good measure. This results in utterances like the following:
There's a moment when visionaries are being called to realize that the work can't be reduced to optimization, but about resonance. We don't transform products by grinding endlessly, we do it by holding the vision. Because meaning can't be forced, it unfolds over time when culture are in integrity. This moment represents a fundamental reimagining in how we think about work. This isn't a framework, it's a lived truth that requires courage. When we get honest, we activate nonlinear growth that don't show up in dashboards, but redefine success anyway.
This should be fairly transparent to humans that this is pseudoprofound anti-content and is a signal to click away.