Discussion
There's lots of things to work out. I'll start by turning this thread into a blog post, expand on it a bit, and publish it. I'll aim that for December 8th - a few weeks after iocaine 3.0, giving me enough time to ease into this new project, and present it in a... better way than this little toot storm.
A while ago, I contemplated the idea of offering hosted iocaine, for a very small fee, about enough to cover the hosting costs, if a dozen or so people would sign up.
The idea was that you'd get a WireGuard tunnel, and through that, could configure which hosts the reverse proxy should front for, and the backend it should use to serve requests that pass iocaine. A simple CLI tool would be provided to manage that, along with an API.
I'd terminate TLS, do the fronting & filtering, and people would self-manage the rest. I'd fight the robots, and we'd collectively giggle at their futile attempts of getting through.
It wasn't a bad idea, there was even some mild interest, too. I eventually gave up, because I couldn't figure out how to build it and run it in a way that wouldn't drive me (even more) insane.
Meanwhile, I tried my best to make iocaine 3.0 much, much easier to self-host. How well that worked? We'll see! I have to cut a release first.
But there remained a problem: even if I make it easy to self-host, one still needs a VPS, and enough sysadmin chops, and enough spoons to set it all up, and run it. I enjoy doing that kind of thing, but a whole lot of people who'd benefit from any kind of scraper protection, do not.
This has been eating me away.
So I thought about a few other ways I can make the life of AI companies hell.
Because if I have to be honest with myself, the reason I'm trying to make iocaine better, easier to use and self-host is not that I'm a selfless person. I'm not doing this out of the goodness of my heart.
I'd love to pretend I do, because that'd help me become a better person. But no, the real reason is that I hate the Crawlers, and the companies behind them, and everything they stand for. And that hate is powerful enough to drive me.
Sure, sure, I'm delighted every time I see people fight back, whether with iocaine, or in any other way (even Anubis! I don't like Anubis, nor its approach, but I admire people's determination to fight back in whatever way they can). But deep down, below a few layers of genuine delight basks the little shoulder-devil in the frothing rage of my heart.
I can hear its laughter. Even now. And the bloody bastard has good ideas.
What if I offered hosted iocaine for free?
In a number of different variations:
I could provide a WireGuard tunnel to an iocaine instance, either shared, or dedicated - in the grand scheme of things, this matters little.
You get to terminate TLS, and control all aspects of your site, only the filtering (& potential garbage generation) is left to me.
I imagine this could be useful for people who already self-host, but don't want to maintain their defenses. The downside here is that there's some additional traffic between your server and mine. HTTP headers for every request, and iocaine's 3-4k garbage responses. I suppose that'd still be a lot smaller than having to serve real contents to the Crawlers.
The original idea: I terminate TLS, do the filtering, you provide the backend. I give you an API, a CLI and a web interface to configure stuff.
The advantage here is that there's less outgoing traffic for you, as I receive the requests directly, and I can serve them garbage directly, without going through WireGuard.
The disadvantage is that I terminate TLS.
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