Nuking the Corporate Web's Web-Scraping Robots
cheapskatesguide.org
Many small website owners can defend their sites from web-crawling robots without big tech's help. Here is how.

Lemmy newb here, not sure if this is right for this /c.

An article I found from someone who hosts their own website and micro-social network, and their experience with web-scraping robots who refuse to respect robots.txt, and how they deal with them.

    • klu9@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      1·
      20 hours ago

      A problem with this approach was that many readers use VPN’s and other proxies that change IP addresses virtually every time they use them. For that reason and because I believe in protecting every Internet user’s privacy as much as possible, I wanted a way of immediately unblocking visitors to my website without them having to reveal personal information like names and email addresses.

      I recently spent a few weeks on a new idea for solving this problem. With some help from two knowledgeable users on Blue Dwarf, I came up with a workable approach two weeks ago. So far, it looks like it works well enough. To summarize this method, when a blocked visitor reaches my custom 403 error page, he is asked whether he would like to be unblocked by having his IP address added to the website’s white list. If he follows that hypertext link, he is sent to the robot test page. If he answers the robot test question correctly, his IP address is automatically added to the white list. He doesn’t need to enter it or even know what it is. If he fails the test, he is told to click on the back button in his browser and try again. After he has passed the robot test, Nginx is commanded to reload its configuration file (PHP command: shell_exec(“sudo nginx -s reload”);), which causes it to immediately accept the new whitelist entry, and he is granted immediate access. He is then allowed to visit cheapskatesguide as often as he likes for as long as he continues to use the same IP address. If he switches IP addresses in the future, he has about a one in twenty chance of needing to pass the robot test again each time he switches IP addresses. My hope is that visitors who use proxies will only have to pass the test a few times a year. As the whitelist grows, I suppose that frequency may decrease. Of course, it will reach a non-zero equilibrium point that depends on the churn in the IP addresses being used by commercial web-hosting companies. In a few years, I may have a better idea of where that equilibrium point is.

    • splendoruranium@infosec.pubEnglish
      41·
      2 days ago

      They block VPN exit nodes. Why bother hosting a web site if you don’t want anyone to read your content?

      Fuck that noise. My privacy is more important to me than your blog.

      It’s a minimalist private blog that sets no 3rd party cookies and loads no 3rd party resources. I presume that alleviates your concerns? 😜

    • tripflag@lemmy.worldEnglish
      85·
      2 days ago

      and filtering malicious traffic is more important to me than you visiting my services, so I guess that makes us even :-)

        • tripflag@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          Absolutely; if I was a company, or hosting something important, or something that was intended for the general public, then I’d agree.

          But I’m just an idiot hosting whimsical stuff from my basement, and 99% of it is only of interest for my friends. I know ~everyone in my target audience, and I know that none of them use a VPN for general-purpose browsing.

          As it is, I don’t mind keeping the door open to the general public, but nothing of value will be lost if I need to pull the plug on some more ASN’s to preserve my bandwidth. For example when a guy hopping through a VPN in Sweden decides to download the same zip file thousands of times, wasting terabytes of traffic over a few hours (this happened a week ago).

          • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.socialEnglish
            1·
            1 day ago

            I know that none of them use a VPN for general-purpose browsing.

            Interesting. The most common setup I encounter is when the VPN is implemented in the home router - that’s the way it is in my house. If you’re connected to my WiFi, you’re going through my VPN.

            I have a second VPN, which is how my private servers are connected; that’s a bespoke peer-to-peer subnet set up in each machine, but it handles almost no outbound traffic.

            My phone detects when it isn’t connected to my home WiFi and automatically turns on the VPN service for all phone data; that’s probably less common. I used to just leave it on all the time, but VPN over VPN seemed a little excessive.

            It sounds like you were a victim of a DOS attack - not distributed, though. It could have just been done directly; what about it being through a VPN made it worse?

        • El Barto@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          You had me until the “ethically sound position” part.

          You’re saying that Joe Blogger is acting unethically because he doesn’t allow VPN users to visit his site. C’mon, brother.