Ditch the Ticket Factory Mentality | Cosmic Teacups’ Thanos Diacakis

**Andrew Zigler** (0:07)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:11)
And I'm your host, Ben Lloyd Pearson.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:13)
In today's news, we're talking about the latest ups and downs in the tech job market, how the persistent effects of layoff anxiety impact our work, and how right now, the only thing protecting all of our free and open source software's websites and infrastructure from constant AI scraper DDoS attacks is a proof of work proxy with an anime logo. So Ben, what do you want to talk about first?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:39)
An anime logo. Well, that caught my attention, but I actually want to talk about that last story first, simply because you and I both have worked on open source in the past. So it's kind of something that holds true to us in particular. So what do we have there?

**Andrew Zigler** (0:54)
You hit it spot on there, is that open source is really important to you and I, and it's the backbone of our world, really. In this article from Niccolo Venarandi, it shows how AI scrapers are aggressively targeting free and open source projects like SourceHut, KDE, Gnome, Fedora, like big names that are the foundational parts of the infrastructure that powers our modern world. And these types of attacks or DDoS attacks coming from AI scrapers, LLM scrapers, collecting information off their doc pages, sometimes going through their Git repos, looking at every single possible file, Git Blame, Git Diff that you could look at in an open source project repository and sometimes doing it multiple times. This kind of effect is really kind of causing free and open source software development to slow down, crawl, be very unresponsive for folks. It's actually kind of wild to see how quickly it has impacted the abilities for developers to actually work on those projects.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:54)
Yeah, and we're seeing that there's a lot of AI companies that are ignoring these conventional web standards that... I mean, when you really think about it, they're not even standards. It's more like a gentleman's agreement when you have a robots text file. It's like generally speaking, we've all been honest enough on the internet, if you have a scraper, to respect the contents of that. But now we have a new type of scraper that's powered by AI, and they're just ignoring those things and doing their best to actually actively evade detection.
All these models, they need tons of data for training and for all the context that they pull in, but they really don't have any sort of incentive to do it in a responsible way, other than keeping their data source from crashing and dying. The thing that really bugs me about this is that open source is built on this concept of transparency and doing things in the open, and it's that very thing that makes open source so awesome is what is now putting them in the crosshairs of these AI bots.

**Andrew Zigler** (2:55)
Yeah, you couldn't have put it better. And the thing that also makes open source awesome is the same thing that's ultimately going to protect it as well. Because from all of this, there's been a tool that's emerged that's helped some of these infrastructures, these websites protect their files from these kinds of DDoS attacks using a new proof of work type of CAPTCHA.
It catches the bots, it prevents them from actually causing all of the inefficiencies on their systems. And this tool, it's called Anubis. It's kind of cool because it does the same thing as the Egyptian god from the mythology that it's named after. It weighs the soul of the incoming HTTP requests, using a proof of work to stop AI crawlers. And that's the same as how in Egyptian mythology, Anubis weighs the heart of the non-living to decide their fate. So, no gnome or llama or penguin mascot here. And Anubis, it has an anime logo. That's the funniest part about it, is that right now, anywhere you can go to a lot of these, you know, FOSS websites, and what pops up is this anime logo that checks that you're human before you can go in.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (4:03)
Strangely enough, this reminds me of Eternal September. Like, I'm getting that vibe from this situation. So, for anyone that may not know, you know, it's back in the mid 90s, in the Usenet community, they got used to having like, every September, all of the college students that would get access to Usenet for the first time in their life would flood the airwaves trying to learn how to actually use Usenet. And then you had this moment where AOL gave everyone a Usenet connection when they signed up for the service. So they call it the Eternal September because you had this endless stream of people trying to learn something new for the first time from this community.