behold the "HTML bomb"

it's a defensive counterattack on AI web-scrapers that persistently scrape and rescrape your web site, even when you tell them not to

the bomb file *looks* like a tiny HTML page, but when scraped -- or even requested by a regular browser ...

... it unpacks into a huge-ass 10-gig HTML page ...

... which quickly crashes any browser or scraper

Item #6 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe to here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-37-wind-theft-an-html-bomb-and-the-rice/

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