Comment on Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

leigh@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

• ranandtoldthat@beehaw.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Yup. This project is cutting off the nose to spite the face. So easily worked around by any scraper, but makes the website worse for actual users. Accessibility is usability.

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• TehPers@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Unfortunately, any tools a screen reader can use to read the page are tools a LLM can use. Without challenge-based solutions like Anubis, I’m not sure what can really be done that isn’t IP whack-a-mole.

  If it comes down to losing accessibility or losing the website due to scrapers obliterating the hosting costs, then I think most website admins would rather just put a “use OCR” message at the top of their skip nav.

  As much as I hate using JS for this, I wonder if there’s a JS-based solution that gets the best of both worlds while killing off scraping. Serve this obfuscated trash initially, then swap it out after completing some challenge sometime after FCP.

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• Midnitte@beehaw.org ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I assume a screen reader that used OCR instead of just copying the text would work (for example, being able to read text in images)

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  • xianjam@programming.dev ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Yes, but this is not typical and the experience is degraded compared to traditional screen readers. There are some that have limited OCR capabilities, but they’re typically used for images without alt text or PDFs that are images.

    This is a bad idea. Accessibility is fairly complicated. Websites are difficult enough to navigate without this.

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