More attacks by dump AI-bots

[Makarius]

On 17/11/2025 00:04, Makarius wrote:
> In the past few days we've had more attacks on our servers, presumably by dumb 
> AI-bots that cannot read robots.txt
> 
> This happens mainly in the late evening (Royal Bavarian Time).

In the past few days the situation had improved in the morning, but not today.


> Notable services that are compromised:
> 
>    https://isabelle.sketis.net/components
>    https://isabelle.sketis.net/repos/isabelle
>    https://isabelle.sketis.net/repos/isabelle-release
The problem are our hgweb servers (via Apache and its builtin Python engine), 
this also applies to https://isabelle.in.tum.de/repos which is presently unusable.
We need to find a proper solution for hgweb + Apache specifically.


For now I have disabled https://isabelle.sketis.net/repos altogether. The main 
Isabelle repositories are still available via https://isabelle-dev.sketis.net 
--- but that is for members only: I had to close it some months ago due to 
dumb AI-bots (Phorge is even more vunerable due to its use of PHP + MySQL).

It should be possible to work with isabelle-dev.sketis.net under program 
control using SSH URLs, after suitable SSH public keys have been uploaded. I 
will see how to change the important isabelle_cronjob (nightly builds) 
accordingly.


In the mid 1990ies the Open Internet has emerged, where everybody could 
participate easily with self-hosted servers. The AI War that started in 
Jan-2025 has destroyed that --- but I am not going to participate in any war 
of any kind.


	Makarius