TikTok’s parent launched a web scraper that’s gobbling up the world’s online data 25-times faster than OpenAI
TikTok’s parent launched a web scraper that’s gobbling up the world’s online data 25-times faster than OpenAI
The crawler, dubbed Bytespider, is scraping the internet at 3,000 times the rate of other genAI tools like Anthropic.
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We've had this thing hammering our servers. The scraper uses randomized user-agents browser/OS combinations and comes from a number of distinct IP ranges in different datacenters around the world, but all the IPs track back to Bytedance.
Wouldn't be surprised if they're just cashing out while TikTok is still public in the US. One last desperate grab at value-add for the parent company before the shut down.
Also a great way to burn the infrastructure for subsequent use. After this, you can guarantee every data security company is going to add the TikTok servers to their firewalls and blacklists. So the American company that tries to harvest the property is going to be tripping over these legacy bullwarks for years after.
This has nothing to do with Tik Tok other than ByteDance being a shareholder in Tik Tok