██████████████████████████████████████████████████ █ █▒ █ This phlog post will make liberal use of ANSI █▒░ █ █▒░ █ COLORZ █▒░ █ █▒░ █ ... in an attempt to deliberatly confuse █▒░ █ spiders and robots crawling my gopher hole in █▒░ █ search for content to feed LLM "ai" datasets. █▒░ █ █▒░ ██████████████████████████████████████████████████▒░ ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ Ok ok ok,... so I've been a bit quiet lately. There's a few reasons for that: 1) R34L L1F3 STUFFs... Admittedly things have been a bit rough lately. My wife has been struggling with some health issues and I've been spending most of my time helping her out. 2) TR4V3LZzz... I visited the homeland (Belgium) for 2 weeks, it was fun but also extremely stressful and exhausing. Many things went wrong. Long story. 3) W0RLD STUFFs... Shit's seriously fucked up lately. Alas, the internet we once knew is no more. It seems no where is safe any longer... and that's kind of what I wanted to talk about in this post. A few months ago, I happen to notice some crazy spikes in my gopher server stats. It is not unusual for various robots and spiders to crawl my gopher server for indexing and what not, but this was very unlike anything else. In the span of a few hours, my server received 26699 requests. That's the highest rate this server has ever had to serve. So I dug a bit deeper into my dashboard and sure enough, all IP's doing the crawling belonged to Yandex. You may know Yandex as the Russian equivalent of Google. And sure enough, they are also working on building AI crap. Seeing gopher DIRECTLY indexed by one of these huge companies was kind of a shock to me. I did not expect this, but I guess I should have seen it comming with all of these companies trying to one-up one another in the new AI boom, gopher is prime loot for them, given that it's all high quality text-only content, often of a highly technical nature. Well,... ▄▄ ▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄▄ ▀ ▀ ▄ █ ▀ █▄ ▄ █ █ ▄▄▄▄▄▄ ▀▄ ▀▄ █ █ █ █ █ █ ▀▀ ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀ I guess truly there is no safe places left. :( Because of this I've become very disheartened and demotivated to post anything more on gopher. What's the point if it's all to be ingested into some AI dataset anyway? I have blocked yandex' IP ranges, but it is of too little too late of course, the ingestion has already happened. Also, all of my HTTP stuff got ingested by Microsoft's AI dataset, completely ignoring robots.txt ---- COOL. Now we're also hearing about META spinning up a mastodon instance so they can ingest all of that sweet mastodon chatter. Sigh. It really just made me want to unplug my rj11 and go perma-offline. But that's not really an option. And also awefully defeatist. So instead, I decided to do something fun. I figured, why not run a BBS server?! With most BBS'es, you typically have to sign up for a username first and fill out some form fields that at least prove you're human. This is different from having to provide personal info at your typical corp0 sign-up form. I don't care about your R33L name or your shoe size. I just want to know you're a human with interest in what's on the board. ... So I started looking at what's out there,... MYSTIC, ENIGMA, SYNCHRONET, etc,... they all have their problems. Mystic is not open source any more. Enigma is evil javascript. Synchronet is C but a terrible huge codebase with a lot of dependencies. There's little to no hope of getting that to run on my solaris/sparc server. So,... Naturally I decided to do what any self respecting h4x0r would, and figured I'd roll my own. Thusly, I bring you:  REVOLTBBS: https://linkerror.com:11175/jns/RevoltBBS This thing is written in TRVECVLT C++ - all you need is a compiler that can do C++17 and an OS with either epoll or kqueues, and a functional libcrypt - that's most POSIXy OSes afaik. Excludes M$ Wind0ze, sorry not sorry. - and Lua. - No other dependencies. Nada. Whilst the server is implemented in C++, it is intended to be fully scriptable with lua - look in the data/ folder for examples of how the current functionality is implemented. It is of course, like most of my stuff, very much a work in progress - It is capable of serving telnet and you can definitively write menus and even little games in lua as it stands though - but I'm still working on file upload functionality and figuring out how all the XYZ-modem stuff is supposed to work.   Aaanyhow... Moving all my stuff over to a BBS is of course not particularly ideal either. For one, gopher, and the smolnet at large are a community. One I am happy (and privileged) to be a part of. For two, it's by no means a fool-proof solution. As such, I took some other measures, like banning the entirety of Yandex, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta at the firewall level by banning their ASNs. Should anyone want to follow suit, this can be accomplished relatively easily if you're running one of the BSDs with pf-badhost ( https://www.geoghegan.ca/pfbadhost.html ) - which is essentially a little script you can shove in cron that will periodically check blacklist and BGP routes and update your firewall rules accordingly. To block AN numbers, just edit the script and find the section where an example AN is already listed. These should get you started:  Microsoft: AS8075 Yandex: AS13238 Amazon: AS14618 Google: AS15169 Amazon: AS16509 Google: AS16550 Google: AS19527 Meta: AS32934 Google: AS36040 Amazon: AS36263 Google: AS36492 Google: AS43515 Amazon: AS46489 Meta: AS54115 Meta: AS63293 Google: AS139070 Google: AS139190 Yandex: AS208722 Google: AS396982  Lastly, as a consequence of this, it is possible that some people accessing gopher via a server or proxy on a cloud service of one of these companies can no longer access my gopher hole. If that's the case for you,... well, I guess sorry not sorry ;) ( one unfortunate consequence in my case of this, is that anyone who has a mastodon instance on a cloud service hosted by one of these companies, will no longer be able to fetch posts from my server - but ... oh well. something something omlettes & eggz ) ▄▀ ▄▀█ ▄▀ █ █ ▄▀▀█ █ █▀█▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ ▄▀█ ▀█▀ █ █ █ █ █ █ ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▀ ▀▀ ▀▀ ▀ ▀▀▀▀ ▀▀▀ ▀▄ Update: The_Gibson of htown joined 2600's Off the Hook show on WBAI to talk about a lot of these issues. You can find the audio in their archive here: https://wbai.org/archive/program/episode/?id=41719 or on the 2600 website: https://2600.com/hook/05-07-2023