Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit

Summary

AI companies continually scrape the internet at an enormous scale, swallowing up all of its contents to use as training data for their next models. If you have a public website, they are already stealing your work. Miasma is here to help you fight back! Spin up the server and point any malicious traffic towards it. Miasma will send poisoned training data from the poison fountain alongside multiple self-referential links. It's an endless buffet of slop for the slop machines. Miasma is very fast and has a minimal memory footprint - you should not have to waste compute resources fending off the internet's leeches. Install with cargo (recommended): Or, download a pre-built binary from releases. Start Miasma with default configuration: View all available configuration options: Let's walk through an example of setting up a server to trap scrapers with Miasma. We'll pick /bots as our server's path to direct scraper traffic. We'll be using Nginx as our server's reverse proxy, but the same result can be achieved with many different setups. When we're done, scrapers will be trapped like so: Within our site, we'll include a few hidden links leading to /bots. <a href="/bots" style="display: none;" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="1"> Amazing high quality data here! </a> The style="display: none;", aria-hidden="true", and tabindex="1" attributes ensure links are totally invisible to human visitors and will be ignored by screen readers and keyboard navigation. They will only be visible to scrapers. Configuring our Nginx Proxy Since our hidden links point to /bots, we'll configure this path to proxy Miasma. Let's assume we're running Miasma on port 9855. location ~ ^/bots($|/.*)$ { proxy_pass http://localhost:9855; } This will match all variations of the /bots path -> /bots, /bots/, /bots/12345, etc. Lastly, we'll start Miasma and specify /bots as the link prefix. This instructs Miasma to start links with /bots/, which ensures scrapers are properly routed through our Nginx proxy back ...