Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth Wants Bad Bots To Get Endlessly Lost

March 24, 2025 by Donald Papp 37 Comments

Cloudflare has gotten more active in its efforts to identify and block unauthorized bots and AI crawlers that don’t respect boundaries. Their solution? AI Labyrinth, which uses generative AI to efficiently create a diverse maze of data as a defensive measure.

This is an evolution of efforts to thwart bots and AI scrapers that don’t respect things like “no crawl” directives, which accounts for an ever-growing amount of traffic. Last year we saw Cloudflare step up their game in identifying and blocking such activity, but the whole thing is akin to an arms race. Those intent on hoovering up all the data they can are constantly shifting tactics in response to mitigations, and simply identifying bad actors with honeypots and blocking them doesn’t really do the job any more. In fact, blocking requests mainly just alerts the baddies to the fact they’ve been identified.

Instead of blocking requests, Cloudflare goes in the other direction and creates an all-you-can-eat sprawl of linked AI-generated content, luring crawlers into wasting their time and resources as they happily process an endless buffet of diverse facts unrelated to the site being crawled, all while Cloudflare learns as much about them as possible.

That’s an important point: the content generated by the Labyrinth might be pointless and irrelevant, but it isn’t nonsense. After all, the content generated by the Labyrinth can plausibly end up in training data, and fraudulent data would essentially be increasing the amount of misinformation online as a side effect. For that reason, the human-looking data making up the Labyrinth isn’t wrong, it’s just useless.

It’s certainly a clever method of dealing with crawlers, but the way things are going it’ll probably be rendered obsolete sooner rather than later, as the next move in the arms race gets made.

Rolling Foam Cutter Gives Mattress A Close Shave

March 24, 2025 by Tom Nardi 19 Comments

There’s many different reasons why somebody might have to hack together their own solution to a problem. It could be to save money, or to save time. Occasionally it’s because the problem is unique enough that there might not be an accepted solution, so you’re on your own to create one. We think the situation that [Raph] recently found himself in was a combination of several of these aspects, which makes his success all the sweeter.

The problem? [Raph] had a pair of foam mattresses from his camper van that needed to be made thinner — each of the three inch (7.62 cm) pieces of foam needed to have one inch (2.5 cm) shaved off as neatly and evenly as possible. Trying to pull that off over the length of a mattress with any kind of manual tools was obviously a no-go, so he built a low-rider foam cutter.

With the mattresses laying on the ground, the idea was to have the cutter simply roll across them. The cutter uses a 45″ (115 cm) long 14 AWG nichrome wire that’s held in tension with a tension arm and bungee cords, which is juiced up with a Volteq HY2050EX 50 V 20 A variable DC power supply. [Raph] determined the current experimentally: the wire failed at 20 A, and cutting speed was too low at 12 A. In the end, 15 A seemed to be the sweet spot.

The actual cutting process was quite slow, with [Raph] finding that the best he could do was about 1/8″ (3 mm) per second on the wider of the two mattresses. While the result was a nice flat cut, he does note that at some point the mattresses started to blister, especially when the current was turned up high. We imagine this won’t be a big deal for a mattress though, as you can simply put that side on the bottom.

In the end, the real problem was the smell. As [Raph] later discovered, polyurethane foam is usually cut mechanically, as cutting it with a hot wire gives off nasty fumes. Luckily he had plenty of ventilation when he was making his cuts, but he notes that the mattresses themselves still have a stink to them a couple days later. Hopefully they’ll finish outgassing before his next camping trip.

As you can imagine, we’ve covered a great number of DIY foam cutters over the years, ranging from the very simple to computerized marvels. But even so, there’s something about the project-specific nature of this cutter that we find charming.