LLMs Are Vastly Worse Than a Waste of Energy and the Externalities Are Huge
Worse than just higher power bills for everybody
The GNU Web site is extremely slow or simply times out. Several subsites of GNU are perpetually inaccessible (the FSF and GNU have about 80 sites/domains/services to maintain*). This was mentioned earlier and also yesterday, albeit the issue isn't entirely new.
Someone from the FSF has just confirmed the issue to us, but said he was not aware of the cause (hadn't asked colleagues).
How do sites like The Register MS feel about taking money from the principal culprits? To help them hype up their scam and do so much damage to so many people while they themselves hide behind ClownFlare? █
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* Based on a 2025 report.
Maintaining all these [GNU/FSF] sites is a “huge task,” July’s blog post explains — especially in the face of those aggressive LLM web crawlers that “have been a significant source of the attacks.”McMahon explained Tuesday that “These likely LLM companies are not leaving contact details so there is no individual companies to report to other than the owners of the IP addresses.”
So like other sites, their first line of defense is “identifying which IP addresses are sending requests as part of the [Distributed Denial of Service], and then having the server ignore requests from those IP addresses,” the blog post explains.
But that’s not as simple as it sounds. Last December a blog post remembered that “one of the recent attacks from the last few months, required blocking more than 40,000 IP addresses from a DDoS attack.” And this month Kelling wrote “That attack continues, but we have mitigated it.” (Although in this case, “Judging from the pattern and scope, the goal was likely to take the site down and it was not an LLM crawler.”)
The bad news? “Since then, we have had more attacks with even higher severity.” And there’s multiple attacks from a variety of sources…
Source: How the Free Software Foundation Battles the LLM Bots