#theftbots

@jackyan.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy

3 months ago

In my #blog
Block and challenge away—there are so few exceptions, it’s like winning the lottery

jackyan.com/blog/2025/12/block-and-c... #theftbots #Cloudflare #BigTech

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Jack Yan (甄爵恩)

@jackyan.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy

3 months ago

A table of 25 attacks at the autocade.net website over a 98-second time frame.

Where are the Autocade scrapers coming from today? Of the latest, six are from #Tencent, and the other 19 are from #Google. Blimmin’ #theftbots.

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Jack Yan (甄爵恩)

@jackyan.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy

3 months ago

Five Google IP addresses hitting one of our sites between 858 and 883 times.

More dodgy activities from crooked #Google customers … 800–900 hits aren’t much but coordinated with four or more other addresses from googleusercontent.com—you get the picture. These are probably scrapers running #theftbots on Google, or hackers probing for vulnerabilities.

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Jack Yan (甄爵恩)

@jackyan.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy

3 months ago

Original post on mastodon.social

RE: wandering.shop/@silverspookgames/115572...

Considering #Google has been setting #theftbots on our sites, allowing its customers to set theftbots on our sites, literally financing disinformation created by “#AI”, and indexing bot-written crap highly to keep us searching […]

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Jack Yan (甄爵恩)

@jackyan.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy

4 months ago

2010: Visitor stats are up on the websites! Great!

2025: Visitor stats are up on the websites! Letʼs check the security settings to make sure there arenʼt any new “#AI” #theftbots we failed to block!

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Jack Yan (甄爵恩)

@jackyan.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy

4 months ago

Original post on mastodon.social

@djoerd They definitely do. We block one called Google-CloudVertexBot, and we also block anything coming from googleusercontent.com. You can see where we managed to deal with most of the #theftbots in the middle of the graph:

jackyan.com/blog/2025/10/the-trails-...

A lot […]

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Jack Yan (甄爵恩)

@jackyan.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy

5 months ago

The trails of the theftbots This was interesting: how the “AI” theftbots (yes, I’m coining that word) affected _Autocade_ ’s traffic. We had blocked a bunch of them already—notably the western ones and ByteDance—but there were many others that still got through. This is from Cloudflare, but even their default settings miss a bunch, especially Chinese ones, and they don’t detect Google and Tencent users who are running their own private theftbots. Cloudflare’s bot fight mode, meanwhile, is too heavy-handed and we saw it block legitimate IPs that I’m sure we had whitelisted. Like so many things, you can’t fight machines using just machines: you need a human element in there. You can see where we started getting a handle on the extra bots, notably the dozens of Tencent addresses hitting us thousands of times a day. Also note the cache patterns: if the cached percentage is running so low, something is wrong. The theftbots were trying different parts of the site that hadn’t been cached—indeed, they may have been web app attackers searching for vulnerabilities—so there wasn’t anything in the cache to serve. Toward the end of September, the percentage starts rising because _humans_ were requesting familiar content. The damage that “AI” is mounting on everyday businesses is huge, not to mention its environmental effects. _Autocade_ isn’t even our most trafficked (by humans) website and those businesses that don’t have security measures in place could find their traffic goes through the roof. Can’t these people stay with the data they have already illegally obtained? No wonder the bubble remains: they have to keep going to keep up appearances because they are too heavily invested, like a gambler whose lucky streak ended a while ago. We’re going to see the theftbots run for a while yet—no one can pinpoint when it all goes to custard—but we should be ready when they’re no longer the flavour of the month. **You may also like** * The extra things you now do in online publishing: blocking suspicious bots * _Autocade_ gets a new logotype; and we block a lot of “AI” bots * Google lies (situation normal), Google users run scrapers, Tencent users attack * If you want a slice of the pie, then compete * Kudos for _Lucire_ ; global trade _sans_ the US; and our ads go tracker-free * After warnings were ignored, we now arrive in the new tech mainstream * Semrush, LLMs (or “AIs”), and Google: a three-headed misinformation hydra? * Switching things around: a post about bots written by a human

In my #blog
The trails of the #theftbots

jackyan.com/blog/2025/10/the-trails-... #AI #publishing #website

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Jack Yan (甄爵恩)

@jackyan.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy

5 months ago

#Autocade traffic is down to more sensible levels. Looks like weʼve successfully blocked almost all of the #theftbots from Google users, Tencent, Alibaba, OpenAI, ByteDance, Meta, Semrush, and others. #bots #GrandTheftAutocorrect

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Posts tagged #theftbots