As a lot of people do, I have some content that is reachable using
webbrowsers. There is the password manager
Vaultwarden, an instance
of Immich, ForgeJo for
some personal git repos, my blog and some other random pages here and
there.

All of this never had been a problem, running a webserver is a
relatively simple task, no matter if you use apache2 , nginx or any of the other possibilities. And the things
mentioned above bring their own daemon to serve the users.

AI crap

And then some idiot somewhere had the idea to ignore every law, every
copyright and every normal behaviour and run some shit AI bot. And
more idiots followed. And now we have more AI bots than humans
generating traffic.

And those AI shit crawlers do not respect any limits. robots.txt, slow
servers, anything to keep your meager little site up and alive? Them
idiots throw more resources onto them to steal content. No sense at
all.

iocaine to the rescue

So them AI bros want to ignore everything and just fetch the whole
internet? Without any consideration if thats even wanted? Or legal?
There are people who dislike this. I am one of them, but there are
some who got annoyed enough to develop tools to fight the AI
craziness. One of those tools is
iocaine – it says about
itself that it is The deadliest poison known to AI.

Feed AI bots sh*t

So you want content? You do not accept any Go away? Then here is
content. It is crap, but appearently you don’t care. So have fun.

What iocaine does is (cite from their webpage) “not made for making
the Crawlers go away. It is an aggressive defense mechanism that tries
its best to take the blunt of the assault, serve them garbage, and
keep them off of upstream resources”.

That is, instead of the expensive webapp using a lot of resources that
are basically wasted for nothing, iocaine generates a small static
page (with some links back to itself, so the crawler shit stays
happy). Which takes a hell of a lot less resource than any fullblown
app.

iocaine setup

The website has a
https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/documentation/, it is not hard to setup. Still, I had to adjust some
things for my setup, as I use [Caddy Docker
Proxy}([https://github.com/lucaslorentz/caddy-docker-proxy) nowadays
and wanted to keep the config within the docker setup, that is, within
the labels.

Caddy container

So my container setup for the caddy itself contains the following
extra lines:

    labels:
      caddy_0.email: [email protected]
      caddy_1: (iocaine)
      caddy_1.0_@read: method GET HEAD
      caddy_1.1_reverse_proxy: "@read iocaine:42069"
      "caddy_1.1_reverse_proxy.@fallback": "status 421"
      caddy_1.1_reverse_proxy.handle_response: "@fallback"

This will be translated to the following Caddy config snippet:

(iocaine) {
        @read method GET HEAD
        reverse_proxy @read iocaine:42069 {
                @fallback status 421
                handle_response @fallback
        }
}

Any container that should be protected by iocaine

All the containers that are “behind” the Caddy reverse proxy can now
get protected by iocaine with just one more line in their
docker-compose.yaml. So now we have

   labels:
      caddy: service.example.com
      caddy.reverse_proxy: "{{upstreams 3000}}"
      caddy.import: iocaine

which translates to

service.example.com {
        import iocaine
        reverse_proxy 172.18.0.6:3000
}

So with one simple extra label for the docker container I have iocaine
activated.

Result? ByeBye (most) AI Bots

Looking at the services that got hammered most from those crap bots –
deploying this iocaine container and telling Caddy about it solved the
problem for me. 98% of the requests from the bots now go to iocaine
and no longer hog resources in the actual services.

I wish it wouldn’t be neccessary to run such tools. But as long as we
have shitheads doing the AI hype there is no hope. I wish they all
would end up in Jail for all their various stealing they do. And
someone with a little more brain left would set things up sensibly,
then the AI thing could maybe turn out something good and useful.

But currently it is all crap.