As a site operator who has been battling with the influx of extremely aggressive AI crawlers, I’m now wondering if my tactics have accidentally blocked internet archive. I am totally ok with them scraping my site, they would likely obey robots.txt, but these days even Facebook ignores it, and exceeds my stipulated crawl delay by distributing their traffic across many IPs. (I even have a special nginx rule just for Facebook.)
Blocking certain JA3 hashes has so far been the most effective counter measures. However I wish there was an nginx wrapper around hugin-net that could help me do TCP fingerprinting as well. As I do not know rust and feel terrified of asking an LLM to make it. There is also a race condition issue with that approach, as it is passive fingerprinting even the JA4 hashes won’t be available for the first connection, and the AI crawlers I’ve seen do one request per IP so you don’t get a chance to block the second request (never happens).
They are not alone in that. The "Archiveteam", a different organization, not to be confused with archive.org, also doesn't respect robots.txt according to their wiki: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt
I think it is safe to say that there is little consideration for site owners from the largest archiving organizations today. Whether there should be is a different debate.
I wonder if it would be practical to have bot-blocking measures that can be bypassed with a signature from a set of whitelisted keys... In this case the server would be happy to allow Internet Archive crawlers.
That's an interesting idea. Mtls could probably be used for this pretty easily. It would require IA to support it if course, but could be a nice solution. I wonder, do they already support it? I might throw up a test...
I'm seeing a lot of comments about how we maintain the status quo, but I'm very interested in hearing from anyone who has conceded that there is no way to stop AI scrapers at this point and what that means for how we maintain public information on the internet in the future.
I don't necessarily believe that we won't find some half-successful solution that will allow server hosting to be done as it currently is, but I'm not very sure that I'll want to participate in whatever schemes come about from it, so I'm thinking more about how I can avoid those schemes rather than insisting that they won't exist/work.
The prevailing thought is that if it's not possible now, it won't be long before a human browser will be indistinguishable from an LLM agent. They can start a GUI session, open a browser, navigate to your page, snapshot from the OS level and backwork your content from the snapshot, or use the browser dev tools or whatever to scrape your page that way. And yes, that would be much slower and more inefficient than what they currently do, but they would only need to do that for those that keep on the bleeding edge of security from AI. For everyone else, you're in a security race against highly-paid interests. So the idea of having something on the public internet that you can stop people from archiving (for whatever purpose they want) seems like it's soon to be an old-fashioned one.
So, taking it as a given that you can't stop what these people are currently trying to stop (without a legislative solution and an enforcement mechanism): how can we make scraping less of a burden on individual hosts? Is this thing going to coalesce into centralizing "archiving" authorities that people trust to archive things, and serve as a much more structured and friendly way for LLMs to scrape? Or is it more likely someone will come up with a way to punish LLMs or their hosts for "bad" behavior? Or am I completely off base? Is anyone actually discussing this? And, if so, what's on the table?
You're going to hate this, but one answer might be blockchain. A crytographically strong, attestable public record of appending information to a shared repository. Combined with cryptographic signatures for humans, it's basically a secure, open git repository for human knowledge.
> Combined with cryptographic signatures for humans
What happens when the human gives an agent access to said signature? Then you fall back on traditional anti-bot techniques and you're right back where you started.
You can have cryptographically signed data caches without the need for a blockchain. What a blockchain can add is the ability to say that a particular piece of data must have existed before a given date, by including the hash of that data somewhere in the chain.
Sounds interesting, but I guess I'm a little unsure of how to connect the dots? Are you suggesting that websites would be hosted on a blockchain and browsed by human-signed browsers? Or more like there would be a blockchain authority, which server hosts could query to determine if a signature, provided by their browser, is human? Would you mind painting the picture in a little more detail?
We're rarely going to need to attest anything is "real" or "human". It's basically only going to matter in civil and criminal court, and IDV.
We don't need to attest signals are analogue vs. digital. The world is going to adapt to the use of Gen AI in everything. The future of art, communications, and productivity will all be rooted in these tools.
I think media outlets think way too highly of their contribution to AI.
Had they never existed, it had likely not made a dent to the AI development - completely like believing that had they been twice as productive, it had likely neither made a dent to the quality of LLMs.
These news media outlets provide a drop in the ocean worth of information. Both qualitatively and quantitatively.
The news / media industry is really just trying to hold on to their lifeboat before inevitably becoming entirely irrelevant.
(I do find this sad, but it is like the reality - I can already now get considerably better journalism using LLMs than actual journalists - both click bait stuff and high quality stuff)
That seems like a reductive way to consider it. What percent of music was created by Led Zeppelin? What percent of art was painted by Monet? What percent of films by Alfred Hitchcock? It may be a small percentage objectively but they are hugely influential.
How does the entire textual corpus of say, new York times compare to all novels? Each article is a page of text, maybe two at most? There certainly are an awful lot of articles. But it's hard to imagine it is much more than a couple hundred novels. There must be thousands of novels released each year
LLMs are (apparently) massively used to get information about topics in the real world. Novels aren't going to be much help there. Journalism, particularly in written form, provides a fount of facts presented from different angles, as well as opinions, and it was all there free for the taking…
Wikipedia provides the scantest summary of that, fora and social media give you banter, fake news, summaries of news, and a whole lot of shaky opinions, at best. Novels give you the foundations of language, but in terms of knowledge nothing much beyond what the novel is about.
Primary sources can and often are, very biased. Journalists are (supposed to be) doing fact checks and gathering multiple sources from all sides. Modern journalism is in a terrible state, but still important.
Imagine if all info about Facebook came from Facebook...
This is why archive.is was created. Should we stop trying to hunt down and punish its creator and support it as the extremely useful project that it is?
Agreed, and if archive.is goes down, archive.org becomes the de facto monopoly in web archival.
That's a problem because archive.org honors removal requests from site owners. Buy an old domain and you can theoretically wipe its archived history clean.
The creator can maintain anonymity. The creator does not deserve to continue being celebrated when they embarked on a DDOS campaign using the traffic of archive.is against a journalist trying to uncover their identity. By these actions, they have shown to be capricious, vindictive, and willing to ensnare their users in their DDOS of others. Whoever they are, they’re terrible.
This is great. Journalists are impeding the preservation of the historical record by blocking archivist traffic while simultaneously manhunting those archivists who find ways around their authwalls.
Soon the news and the historical facts will be unnecessary. You can simply receive your wisdom from the AIs, which, as nondeterministic systems, are free to change the facts at will.
>This is great. Journalists are impeding the preservation of the historical record by blocking archivist traffic while simultaneously manhunting those archivists who find ways around their authwalls.
You are deliberately misrepresenting the situation. The journalists who block archivist traffic are not in any way connected to the blogger who was attempting to investigate the creator of archive.is. You have portrayed them as related in an attempt to garner sympathy for the creator of archive.is.
Thanks for this. I didn’t know about the details, and there are probably mor... but this gyrovague person is clearly being a privileged trouble. Their “boringly straightforward curiosity” is an admittance of their shallow thinking. When you are pointed out that you’re hurting someone in some respect that you weren’t intentional about, you should stop, sit down, and reconsider everything in that respect.
You may end up deciding to continue inflicting harm, intentionally so this time---that is a perfectly valid course to take. But you cannot anymore remain unintentional about it.
Indeed. I am highly supportive of archive.is, but let's remember that he hijacked his own users to become a bot net. That should make all us hackers furious. Is a complete violation of trust. Our residential IPs were used to attack someone, meaning he put us all at risk for his own personal goals. It's disgusting behavior and he should be called out for it. But we should also realize he's offering an important and free service to us all. I support him, but this is not something we should just ignore. Trust is very important.
Well, if they deserve anonymity, they also deserve to be able to protect it, and they have really few tools against a doxxing, the DDOS was one of them, corrupting the archived article was another, albeit dangerous for their own reputation as an archiver.
The crux of the problem was the doxxing, not the defense against it.
I think this is a weak framing. Lots of things are moral or immoral under specific circumstances. We should protect people from being murdered. I think murder is usually wrong. But we also likely agree that there are circumstances in which killing someone can be justified. If we can find context for taking a life, I'm quite sure we can find context for a DoS.
So their desire to not be used to commit a cyberattack doesn’t factor in? As long as they aren’t legally liable, it doesn’t matter?
Also a checkbox that says something like “I would like to help commit a crime using my internet traffic” would keep people from having their traffic used without consent.
Not defending any party, it's basic ethological expectation: a creature that try to beat an other should expect aggressive response in return.
Of course, never aggressing anyone and transform any aggression agaisnt self into an opportunity to acculturate the aggressor into someone with the same empathic behavior is a paragon of virtuous entity. But paragons of virtue is not the median norm, by definition.
> Not defending any party, it's basic ethological expectation: a creature that try to beat an other should expect aggressive response in return.
Another basic ethological expectation is that the strong dominate the weak, but maybe we shouldn’t base our moral framework around how things are, and rather on how they should be.
You don't think non-consensually revealing somebody's identity is a problem?
Resorting to DDoS is not pretty, but "why is my violent behavior met with violence" is a little oblivious and reversal of victim and perpetrator roles.
There's an old legal maxim "in pari delicto potior est conditio defendentis", that is "in a case of mutual fault the position of the defending party is the better one."
> But in recent months The New York Times began blocking the Archive from crawling its website, using technical measures that go beyond the web’s traditional robots.txt rules. That risks cutting off a record that historians and journalists have relied on for decades. Other newspapers, including The Guardian, seem to be following suit.
I'm a bit surprised I never read about this till now, though while disappointing it is unfortunately not surprising.
> The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several—including the Times—are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There’s a strong case that such training is fair use.
I suspect part of it might be these corps not wanting people to skip a paywall (whether or not someone would pay even if they had no access is a different story). But this argument makes no sense for the Guardian.
I went to Guardian's website to cross check their motto (getting confused with WaPo's motto) and got served this (hilarious? sad?) banner. As if blocking cross website tracking is somehow bad.
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The Guardian’s ads asking for contributions have got progressively more desperate. I find their commitment to keeping their site paywall free admirable, but the current almost-begging (and selling off their Sunday paper) has got so intense that it feels like it’s only a matter of time until they introduce some kind of paid content.
Devil's advocate: Anyone seeking to limit AI scraping doesn't have much of a choice in also blocking archivists.
And it's genuinely not that weird for news organisations to want to stop AI scraping. This is just a repeat of their fight with social media embedding.
Sure. The back catalogue should be as close to public domain as possible, libraries keeping those records is incredibly important for research.
But with current news, that becomes complicated as taking the articles and not paying the subscription (or viewing their ads) directly takes away the revenue streams that newsrooms rely on to produce the news. Hence the "Newspaper trying to ban linking" mess, which was never about the links themselves but about social media sites embedding the headline and a snippet, which in turn made all the users stop clicking through and "paying" for the article.
Social media relies on those newsrooms (same with really, most other kinds of websites) to provide a lot of their content. And AI relies on them for all of the training data (remember: "Synthetic data" does not appear ex nihilo) & to provide the news that the AI users request. We can't just let the newsrooms die. The newsroom hasn't been replaced itself, it's revenue has been destroyed.
---
And so, the question of archives pops up. Because yes, you can with some difficulty block out the AI bots, even the social media bots. A paywall suffices.
But this kills archiving. Yet if you whitelist the archives in some way, the AI scrapers will just pull their data out of the archive instead and the newsrooms still die. (Which also makes the archiving moot)
A compromise solution might be for archives to accept/publish things on a delay, keep the AI companies from taking the current news without paying up, but still granting everyone access to stuff from decades ago.
There's just major disagreement about what a reasonable delay is. Most major news orgs and other such IP-holders are pretty upset about AI firm's "steal first, ask permission later" approach. Several AI firms setting the standard that training data is to be paid for doesn't help here either. In paying for training data they've created a significant market for archives, and significant incentive to not make them publicly freely accessible.
Why would The Times ever hand over their catalogue to the Internet Archive if Amazon will pay them a significant sum of money for it? The greater good of all humanity? Good luck getting that from a dying industry.
---
Tangent: Another annoying wrinkle in the financial incentives here is that not all archiving organisations are engaging in fair play, which yet further pushes people to obstruct their work.
To cite a HN-relevant example: Source code archivist "Software Heritage" has long engaged in holding a copy of all the sourcecode they can get their hands on, regardless of it's license. If it's ever been on github, odds are they're distributing it. Even when licenses explicitly forbid that. (This is, of course, perfectly legal in the case of actual research and other fair use. But:)
They were notable involved in HuggingFace's "The Stack" project by sharing a their archives ... and received money from HuggingFace. While the latter is nominally a donation, this is in effect a sale.
---
I find it quite displeasing that the EFF fails to identify the incentives at play here. Simply trying to nag everyone into "doing the thing for the greater good!" is loathsome and doesn't work. Unless we change this incentive structure, the outcome won't change.
It would be better if there was some arrangement the papers could reach with Archive where they just delay the release or wait a week then its part of the archive. That way, news stuff gets paid for when its hot and fresh but then it gets archived and the record is preserved
Blocking certain JA3 hashes has so far been the most effective counter measures. However I wish there was an nginx wrapper around hugin-net that could help me do TCP fingerprinting as well. As I do not know rust and feel terrified of asking an LLM to make it. There is also a race condition issue with that approach, as it is passive fingerprinting even the JA4 hashes won’t be available for the first connection, and the AI crawlers I’ve seen do one request per IP so you don’t get a chance to block the second request (never happens).
If only... Despite providing a useful service, they are not as nice towards site owners as one would hope.
Internet Archive says:
> We see the future of web archiving relying less on robots.txt file declarations geared toward search engines
https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
They are not alone in that. The "Archiveteam", a different organization, not to be confused with archive.org, also doesn't respect robots.txt according to their wiki: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt
I think it is safe to say that there is little consideration for site owners from the largest archiving organizations today. Whether there should be is a different debate.
I don't necessarily believe that we won't find some half-successful solution that will allow server hosting to be done as it currently is, but I'm not very sure that I'll want to participate in whatever schemes come about from it, so I'm thinking more about how I can avoid those schemes rather than insisting that they won't exist/work.
The prevailing thought is that if it's not possible now, it won't be long before a human browser will be indistinguishable from an LLM agent. They can start a GUI session, open a browser, navigate to your page, snapshot from the OS level and backwork your content from the snapshot, or use the browser dev tools or whatever to scrape your page that way. And yes, that would be much slower and more inefficient than what they currently do, but they would only need to do that for those that keep on the bleeding edge of security from AI. For everyone else, you're in a security race against highly-paid interests. So the idea of having something on the public internet that you can stop people from archiving (for whatever purpose they want) seems like it's soon to be an old-fashioned one.
So, taking it as a given that you can't stop what these people are currently trying to stop (without a legislative solution and an enforcement mechanism): how can we make scraping less of a burden on individual hosts? Is this thing going to coalesce into centralizing "archiving" authorities that people trust to archive things, and serve as a much more structured and friendly way for LLMs to scrape? Or is it more likely someone will come up with a way to punish LLMs or their hosts for "bad" behavior? Or am I completely off base? Is anyone actually discussing this? And, if so, what's on the table?
Maybe it'll just be cheaper for CDNs or whatever to sell the data they serve directly instead of doing extra steps with scraping
What happens when the human gives an agent access to said signature? Then you fall back on traditional anti-bot techniques and you're right back where you started.
We don't need to attest signals are analogue vs. digital. The world is going to adapt to the use of Gen AI in everything. The future of art, communications, and productivity will all be rooted in these tools.
Had they never existed, it had likely not made a dent to the AI development - completely like believing that had they been twice as productive, it had likely neither made a dent to the quality of LLMs.
NY Times is 0.06% of common crawl.
These news media outlets provide a drop in the ocean worth of information. Both qualitatively and quantitatively.
The news / media industry is really just trying to hold on to their lifeboat before inevitably becoming entirely irrelevant.
(I do find this sad, but it is like the reality - I can already now get considerably better journalism using LLMs than actual journalists - both click bait stuff and high quality stuff)
Instead, training attempt to sample more heavily from higher quality sources, with, I'm sure, a mix of manual and heuristic labeling.
LLMs are (apparently) massively used to get information about topics in the real world. Novels aren't going to be much help there. Journalism, particularly in written form, provides a fount of facts presented from different angles, as well as opinions, and it was all there free for the taking…
Wikipedia provides the scantest summary of that, fora and social media give you banter, fake news, summaries of news, and a whole lot of shaky opinions, at best. Novels give you the foundations of language, but in terms of knowledge nothing much beyond what the novel is about.
Imagine if all info about Facebook came from Facebook...
Preventing new human generated text from being used by AI firms (without consent) seems like a valid strategy.
Modern LLMs are trained on a large percentage of synthetic data.
This sentiment is largely legacy (even though just a couple of years old).
That's a problem because archive.org honors removal requests from site owners. Buy an old domain and you can theoretically wipe its archived history clean.
Soon the news and the historical facts will be unnecessary. You can simply receive your wisdom from the AIs, which, as nondeterministic systems, are free to change the facts at will.
You are deliberately misrepresenting the situation. The journalists who block archivist traffic are not in any way connected to the blogger who was attempting to investigate the creator of archive.is. You have portrayed them as related in an attempt to garner sympathy for the creator of archive.is.
Here is an account of the facts: https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...
You may end up deciding to continue inflicting harm, intentionally so this time---that is a perfectly valid course to take. But you cannot anymore remain unintentional about it.
The crux of the problem was the doxxing, not the defense against it.
Do people not also deserve to be protected from being DDOSed? Do people also not deserve to not have their internet traffic be used to DDOS someone?
Also a checkbox that says something like “I would like to help commit a crime using my internet traffic” would keep people from having their traffic used without consent.
It is, but it's one of the only tools they have to prevent the doxxing site to being reachable.
> Do people not also deserve to be protected from being DDOSed?
You mean the person doing the doing should be protected ?
>Do people also not deserve to not have their internet traffic be used to DDOS someone?
Yes, it should have been opt-in. But unless you doesn't run JS, you kinda give right to the website you visit to run arbitrary code anyway.
Of course, never aggressing anyone and transform any aggression agaisnt self into an opportunity to acculturate the aggressor into someone with the same empathic behavior is a paragon of virtuous entity. But paragons of virtue is not the median norm, by definition.
Another basic ethological expectation is that the strong dominate the weak, but maybe we shouldn’t base our moral framework around how things are, and rather on how they should be.
Resorting to DDoS is not pretty, but "why is my violent behavior met with violence" is a little oblivious and reversal of victim and perpetrator roles.
I do think it’s a problem. You are the only one excusing bad behavior here.
I'm a bit surprised I never read about this till now, though while disappointing it is unfortunately not surprising.
> The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several—including the Times—are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There’s a strong case that such training is fair use.
I suspect part of it might be these corps not wanting people to skip a paywall (whether or not someone would pay even if they had no access is a different story). But this argument makes no sense for the Guardian.
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We believe that access to trustworthy, factual information is in the public good, which is why we keep our website open to all, without a paywall.
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So ads, just not personalized. Remind me again why personalized ads are good for me if I have to pay to have non-personalized ads?
There must be some mechanism to prevent tampering in such a setup.
Trivial as long as they terminate the TLS on their end, not yours. So you'd just be a residential proxy.
Unless you love walled gardens, doomscrolling and endless AI slop that seems like the fun is over
And it's genuinely not that weird for news organisations to want to stop AI scraping. This is just a repeat of their fight with social media embedding.
Sure. The back catalogue should be as close to public domain as possible, libraries keeping those records is incredibly important for research.
But with current news, that becomes complicated as taking the articles and not paying the subscription (or viewing their ads) directly takes away the revenue streams that newsrooms rely on to produce the news. Hence the "Newspaper trying to ban linking" mess, which was never about the links themselves but about social media sites embedding the headline and a snippet, which in turn made all the users stop clicking through and "paying" for the article.
Social media relies on those newsrooms (same with really, most other kinds of websites) to provide a lot of their content. And AI relies on them for all of the training data (remember: "Synthetic data" does not appear ex nihilo) & to provide the news that the AI users request. We can't just let the newsrooms die. The newsroom hasn't been replaced itself, it's revenue has been destroyed.
---
And so, the question of archives pops up. Because yes, you can with some difficulty block out the AI bots, even the social media bots. A paywall suffices.
But this kills archiving. Yet if you whitelist the archives in some way, the AI scrapers will just pull their data out of the archive instead and the newsrooms still die. (Which also makes the archiving moot)
A compromise solution might be for archives to accept/publish things on a delay, keep the AI companies from taking the current news without paying up, but still granting everyone access to stuff from decades ago.
There's just major disagreement about what a reasonable delay is. Most major news orgs and other such IP-holders are pretty upset about AI firm's "steal first, ask permission later" approach. Several AI firms setting the standard that training data is to be paid for doesn't help here either. In paying for training data they've created a significant market for archives, and significant incentive to not make them publicly freely accessible.
Why would The Times ever hand over their catalogue to the Internet Archive if Amazon will pay them a significant sum of money for it? The greater good of all humanity? Good luck getting that from a dying industry.
---
Tangent: Another annoying wrinkle in the financial incentives here is that not all archiving organisations are engaging in fair play, which yet further pushes people to obstruct their work.
To cite a HN-relevant example: Source code archivist "Software Heritage" has long engaged in holding a copy of all the sourcecode they can get their hands on, regardless of it's license. If it's ever been on github, odds are they're distributing it. Even when licenses explicitly forbid that. (This is, of course, perfectly legal in the case of actual research and other fair use. But:)
They were notable involved in HuggingFace's "The Stack" project by sharing a their archives ... and received money from HuggingFace. While the latter is nominally a donation, this is in effect a sale.
---
I find it quite displeasing that the EFF fails to identify the incentives at play here. Simply trying to nag everyone into "doing the thing for the greater good!" is loathsome and doesn't work. Unless we change this incentive structure, the outcome won't change.