cross-posted from: https://infosec.exchange/users/thenexusofprivacy/statuses/115012347040350824

As you’ve probably seen or heard Dropsitenews has published a list (from a Meta whistleblower) of “the roughly 100,000 top websites and content delivery network addresses scraped to train Meta’s proprietary AI models” – including quite a few fedi sites. Meta denies everything of course, but they routinely lie through their teeth so who knows. In any case, whether the specific details in the report are accurate, it’s certainly a threat worth thinking about.

So I’m wondering what defenses fedi admins are using today to try to defeat scrapers: robots.txt, user-agent blocking, firewall-level blocking of ip ranges, Cloudflare or Fastly AI scraper blocking, Anubis, stuff you don’t want to disclose … @deadsuperhero@social.wedistribute.org has some good discussion on We Distribute. It would b e very interesting to hear what various instances are doing.

And a couple of more open-ended questions:

  • Do you feel like your defenses against scraping are generally holding up pretty well?

  • Are there other approaches that you think might be promising that you just haven’t had the time or resources to try?

  • Do you have any language in your terms of servive that attempts to prohibit training for AI?

Here’s @FediPact’s post with a link to the Dropsitenews report and (in the replies) a list of fedi instances and CDNs that show up on the list.

https://cyberpunk.lol/@FediPact/114999480874284493

@fediverse @fediversenews

#MastoAdmin #Meta #FediPact

  • Jeena@piefed.jeena.netEnglish
    10·
    12 days ago

    The only thing I’ve been doing on my blog (not on my piefed instance yet, but probably should) was user agent filtering:

    if ($http_user_agent ~* (SemrushBot|AhrefsBot|PetalBot|YisouSpider|Amazonbot|VelenPublicWebCrawler|DataForSeoBot|Expanse,\ a\ Palo\ Alto\ Networks\ company|BacklinksExtendedBot|ClaudeBot|OAI-SearchBot)) {
    return 403;
    }

  • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
    8·
    12 days ago

    There are no PieFed instances in that list. Maybe because Meta is blocked in the default PieFed robots.txt or maybe PieFed is too obscure.

    The robots.txt on Mastodon and Lemmy is basically useless.

    The Mbin robots.txt is massive but does not block Meta’s crawler so presumably it is not being kept up to date.

    Any fedi devs reading this: add these

    User-agent: meta-externalagent  
User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent  
User-agent: meta-externalfetcher  
User-agent: Meta-ExternalFetcher  
User-agent: TikTokSpider  
User-agent: DuckAssistBot  
User-agent: anthropic-ai  
Disallow: /