In-reply-to » @bender Oh, there’s an easy explanation. But maybe some mysteries are best left unexplained. 😃 If you want to solve this riddle: The solution is in the phlog! Somewhere! 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I noticed that:

gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2018/2018-06/2018-06-01.txt

Is the first non-justified, and it is when you started using Markdown. The last justified one was:

gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2018/2018-05/2018-05-27.txt

So, I might have found the mystery! :-D

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » @bender Yeah, the acronym is funny. 😅

Haha, fun! I browsed your gopher hole a little bit. I noticed some entries are fully justified (formatting), while others are not. I didn’t notice a pattern, though it makes sense not to use justification on entries with code. Yet, some prose entries are, and some are not. A mystery. :-)

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » I think I’m gonna participate in ROOPHLOCH this year: gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/announcing-roophloch-2025.gmi

@bender@twtxt.net Yeah, the acronym is funny. 😅

Wandering through the woods for 8km … gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-09/2025-09-03–roophloch.txt

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » I think I’m gonna participate in ROOPHLOCH this year: gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/announcing-roophloch-2025.gmi

For those not on Gemini, a proxy provides more insides on such, hmm, interesting acronym. :-D

⤋ Read More

Welp, my rent’s gone out and my student loan won’t be in for another week, so I’m not spending anything for a while. How’s everyone else’s September going?

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » Now that’s interesting. Some of these bots start crawling at URLs like this:

Chances are the database bought wasn’t cheap at all and was aold by some scam company that probably ripped them from six figures or more for a database that’s full of rubbish. 🤣

⤋ Read More

Now that’s interesting. Some of these bots start crawling at URLs like this:

https://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/NetTracer-Scenes/GPUTracer/multipass/xlonitor/http-collect/getpw

That is obviously completely wrong. But I can explain it. Some years ago, I screwed up my nginx rewrite rules, and that’s how these broken URLs came to be.

It all redirects to /git now, which is why that endpoint sees so much traffic lately.

But what does that mean? Why do they start there? I can only speculate that this company bought an old database of web links and they use that to start crawling. And it was probably a cheap one, because these redirects have been fixed for quite a long time now.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » @movq Right now I'm basically just blocking entire ASN(s) at this point and large blocks of IP(s) from Anthropic, OPenAI, Microsoft and others.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m doing that now as well, but I don’t think this is a good solution. This is going to hurt “self-hosting” in the long run: I cannot afford true self-hosting where I actually do host everything here at home – instead, I must use a cloud provider / VPS for that. It is only a matter of time until my provider starts doing AI shit as well (or rather, the customers do it) and then what? I get blocked, e.g. I can’t send email to (some) people anymore. This is already bad and it’s going to get worse.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » Hahaha, how funny is that!? The Dunning-Kruger effect research was sparked off by two bank robbers who rubbed lemon juice in their faces as this makes them invisible, just like invisible ink. :'-D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995GreaterPittsburghbankrobberies

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Didn’t know that, either. 😂 The one guy even tried to test this theory with a Polaroid? And “confirmed” it? What the heck. 🥴

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » The bots have begun to access my website way more often. I’m getting about 120k hits on https://www.uninformativ.de/git/ now in a couple of hours.

@dce@hashnix.club Yeah, I’ve read about that approach. Sounds clever. Truth is, I’m too tired. 😢 I don’t want to spend too much of my time fighting assholes.

I’ve now started blocking entire cloud hosters. Sorry, not sorry.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » The bots have begun to access my website way more often. I’m getting about 120k hits on https://www.uninformativ.de/git/ now in a couple of hours.

As expected: Didn’t last long. They’re coming from different IPs now.

I’ve read enough blog posts by other people to know that this is probably pointless. The bots have so many IPs/networks at their disposal …

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » The bots have begun to access my website way more often. I’m getting about 120k hits on https://www.uninformativ.de/git/ now in a couple of hours.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, I’ve blocked some large subnets now (most likely overblocking a lot of stuff) and it has died down.

I’m not looking forward to doing this on a regular basis. This is supposed to be a fun hobby – and it was, for many years. Maybe that time is just over.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » The bots have begun to access my website way more often. I’m getting about 120k hits on https://www.uninformativ.de/git/ now in a couple of hours.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Right now I’m basically just blocking entire ASN(s) at this point and large blocks of IP(s) from Anthropic, OPenAI, Microsoft and others.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » The bots have begun to access my website way more often. I’m getting about 120k hits on https://www.uninformativ.de/git/ now in a couple of hours.

“But all your stuff is MIT licensed! They are allowed to do that!”

Haha. As if they would care. They crawl everything they get their hands on.

Besides, that’s not true, the license states that the copyright notice must be retained. “AI” breaks that. They incorporate my code and my articles in their product and make it appear as if it was their work.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » The bots have begun to access my website way more often. I’m getting about 120k hits on https://www.uninformativ.de/git/ now in a couple of hours.

Why do I care about this?

  1. The load will become a problem at some point.
  2. These crawlers and the current “AI” in general are breaking the rules. I am supposed to be paying for every little thing, I get sued for “piracy”. But apparently, these rules only apply to me. If I had more money, I could break them. Fuck that.
  3. I simply don’t want it. Period.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » The bots have begun to access my website way more often. I’m getting about 120k hits on https://www.uninformativ.de/git/ now in a couple of hours.

This probably means that I can no longer host my own website. I don’t want to deploy something like Anubis, because that ruins the whole thing: I want it to be accessible from ancient browsers, like OS/2 or Windows 3.11.

I’ll keep an eye on it for a while. Maybe try to block some IPs.

Sooner or later, I’ll take the website down and shift everything to Gopher.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » The bots have begun to access my website way more often. I’m getting about 120k hits on https://www.uninformativ.de/git/ now in a couple of hours.

It doesn’t pose a problem for my server’s performance – yet. But if more bots/companies start doing this, my website will go down from the load.

⤋ Read More

The bots have begun to access my website way more often. I’m getting about 120k hits on https://www.uninformativ.de/git/ now in a couple of hours.

They don’t cache anything, probably on purpose.

It comes in waves. I get about 100 hits (all at once) on that /git endpoint, all from different IPs. Then it takes a moment until I get another wave of about 500-1000 requests (all at once) where they do HEAD requests on some of the paths below /git. I assume they did a GET earlier and are now checking if something has changed.

⤋ Read More