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TikTok’s parent launched a web scraper that’s gobbling up the world’s online data 25-times faster than OpenAI (fortune.com)

submitted 4 weeks ago by LuuTuyen@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com 82 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

Also it doesn't respect robots.txt (the file that tells bots whether or not a given page can be accessed) unlike most AI scrapping bots.

[–] kboy101222@sh.itjust.works 51 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

My personal website that primarily functions as a front end to my home server has been getting BEAT by these stupid web scrapers. Every couple of days the server is unusable because some web scraper demanded every single possible page and crashed the damn thing

[–] assaultpotato@sh.itjust.works 15 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I do the same thing, and I've noticed my modem has been absolutely bricked probably 3-4 times this month. I wonder if this is why.

[–] kboy101222@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 weeks ago

Thankfully they haven't bricked my modem yet, but it's possibly worth looking into

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Can't you just disallow all external requests other than your own IP? If it's a personal website that's just for you then it really doesn't need to be accessible by anyone else and if anyone comes along that needs access you can just manually add their IP.

It's a minor pain to have to implement it, but it's an easy solution

[–] kboy101222@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I have family and friends that also access the sites contents, so that's sadly not feasible without getting the IPs from dozens of different devices

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

But once you've got them that's the end of it they're unlikely to change their IP addresses.

My point is it's not like you need to be public facing, whether it would be literally millions of IP addresses that would be valid amongst a few dozen that are invalid.

[–] kboy101222@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 weeks ago

I should specify - I have family of various, but typically quite low, technical skills and of various far distances apart that use the server. So it's either walk them through getting the IP of every device they access with or driving up to about 8 hours away to do it myself.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

My god... It's true. TikTok does access the home wifi network! https://youtu.be/OSQ76ZrHmd4

Obviously

[–] kboy101222@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Funnily enough, the bot everyone identified as tik tok hasn't hit me as far as I'm aware. It's mostly been random LLM bots grabbing data to train.

[–] glimse@lemmy.world 21 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

most

I doubt that...

[–] DarkThoughts@fedia.io 14 points 4 weeks ago

People would be able to tell from the traffic on their websites.

[–] Sparky@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 3 weeks ago

Out of the 60gb/month of traffic my website gets, 20gb is because of bytedance's webscraper. I haven't gotten around to blocking them as bandwidth isn't an issue but damn do they send a lot of requests.