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/
