Followup on Inquiry about regreSSHion postmortem

[Aaron Rainbolt]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2025 at 3:45 PM Stuart Henderson <stu at spacehopper.org> wrote:
>
> On 2025/08/20 18:40, Rene Malmgren wrote:
> > No, on a bit of a different topic, do you know why your server, when asked about a file that looks very similar to a file a regular diff from your repo, easily posted as a reference in an email.
> >
> > https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/ssh/log.c.diff?ipk=fF83_JCDCKqCJ85QEwn7jbP5Ag2cF3ZCTZ6QbjGp4RE&r1=1.52&r2=1.53&f=h
> >
> > Redirects your browser via 301 to https://theannoyingsite.com/
>
> You can thank 'AI' scrapers for that, they were killing the server by
> requesting diffs between every version they could find, I imagine the
> admin of the server was fairly annoyed with them when doing this.

I mean... that's a rather questionable decision, most of the APIs that
site calls only cause chaos for standard desktop users like myself.
Indeed, it was *because* I figured it was an anti-scraper defense that
I went ahead and triggered the site's full fury (thankfully using an
alternate browser which I was able to clear the history of in order to
fix the mess it made). Deploying Anubis (or, if one wants to poison
scrapers, Iocaine) would be much more effective and less likely to
backfire.

fwiw though, the presentation on how the site works is fascinating:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFZ-pwErSl4

> It is not specific to any particular file, the diff part of cvsweb was
> disabled completely. Either use a cvs checkout and the native commands,
> or one of the git conversions.
>
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