I use iocaine[0] to generate a tarpit. Yesterday it served ~278k "pages" consisting of ~500MB of gibberish (and that's despite banning most AI scrapers in robots.txt.)
It still fails with all of my extensions disabled (wipr, privacy redirect). I just get a download dialog. I don't know what the HTTP status code is, however.
I found a flagged HN submission about it and it has just about the same result for me and for others. My first tap failed in a weird way (showed some text then redirected quickly to its git repo) and all subsequent taps trigger a download.
Unfortunately and you kind of have to count this as the cost of the Internet. You've wasted 500Mb of bandwidth.
I've had colocation for eight years+. My monthly b/w cost is now around 20-30Gb a month given to scrapers where I was only be using 1-2Gb a month, years prior.
I pay for premium bandwidth (it's a thing) and only get 2TB of usable data. Do I go offline or let it continue?
i have no idea what this does because the site is rejecting my ordinary firefox browser with "Error code: 418 I'm a teapot". Even from a private browser.
If I hit it with Chrome, now I can see a site.
Seems pretty not ready for prime time as a lot of my viewers use Firefox
It flashes some text briefly then gives me an 418 TEAPOT response. I wonder if it's because I'm on Linux?
EDIT: Begrudgingly checked Chrome, and it loads. I guess it doesn't like Firefox?