News: 0001611460

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Debian's CI Data No Longer Publicly Browseable Due To LLM Scrapers / Bot Traffic

([Debian] 11 Minutes Ago Restricting Debian CI)


LLM scrapers for AI are even hungry for Debian's continuous integration "CI" data. Due to the ongoing abuse of the open web by LLM scrapers, the Debian CI infrastructure is restricting the publicly accessible data with their web server resources being hammered by bots/scrapers.

Paul Gevers on the behalf of the Debian CI team laid out some steps they needed to take in order to survive all of the scraper traffic to the [1]ci.debian.net resource. First of all, the site is no longer publicly browseable unless you are an authenticated user. They've had to gate this information now to help fend off all the bot/scraping traffic. Though direct links to test log files are still permitted to help with convenience.

The other change is adding a fail2ban-based firewall to address abusive traffic patterns. This has resulted in changes being made after initially finding some legitimate Debian contributors being blocked from the Debian CI portal. They think now they have a good balance for this fail2ban firewall for not accidentally triggering for real users while keeping the LLM scrapers away.

More details on these recent headaches for the Debian CI team as a result of LLM scapers going wild on the open web can be found via [2]this team status update .



[1] https://ci.debian.net/

[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2026/02/msg00001.html


It is a very humbling experience to make a multimillion-dollar mistake, but it
is also very memorable. I vividly recall the night we decided how to organize
the actual writing of external specifications for OS/360. The manager of
architecture, the manager of control program implementation, and I were
threshing out the plan, schedule, and division of responsibilities.

The architecture manager had 10 good men. He asserted that they could write
the specifications and do it right. It would take ten months, three more
than the schedule allowed.

The control program manager had 150 men. He asserted that they could prepare
the specifications, with the architecture team coordinating; it would be
well-done and practical, and he could do it on schedule. Furthermore, if
the architecture team did it, his 150 men would sit twiddling their thumbs
for ten months.

To this the architecture manager responded that if I gave the control program
team the responsibility, the result would not in fact be on time, but would
also be three months late, and of much lower quality. I did, and it was. He
was right on both counts. Moreover, the lack of conceptual integrity made
the system far more costly to build and change, and I would estimate that it
added a year to debugging time.
-- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month"