Website operators are being asked to feed LLM crawlers poisoned data by a project called Poison Fountain.
The project page links to URLs which provide a practically endless stream of poisoned training data. They have determined that this approach is very effective at ultimately sabotaging the quality and accuracy of AI which has been trained on it.
Small quantities of poisoned training data can significantly damage a language model.
The page also gives suggestions on how to put the provided resources to use.
I assume that the gitea instance itself was being hit directly, which would make sense. It has a whole rendering stack that has to reach out to a database, get data, render the actual webpage through a template…etc
It’s a massive amount of work compared to serving up static files from say Nginx or Caddy. You can stick one of these in front of your servers, and cache http responses (to some degree anyways, that depends on gitea)
Benchmarks like this show what kind of throughput you can expect on say a 4 core VM just serving up cached files: https://blog.tjll.net/reverse-proxy-hot-dog-eating-contest-caddy-vs-nginx/#10-000-clients
90-400MB/s derived from the stats here on 4 cores. Enough to saturate a 3Gb/s connection. And caching intentionally polluted sites is crazy easy since you don’t care if it’s stale or not. Put a cloudflair cache on front of it and even easier.
You could dedicate an old Ryzen CPU (Say a 2700x) box to a proxy, and another RAM heavy device for the servers, and saturate 6Gb/s with thousands and thousands of various software instances that feed polluted data.
Hell, if someone made it a deployable utility… Oof just have self hosters dedicate a VM to shitting on LLM crawlers, make it a party.