# The deadliest poison known to AI

### Stays out of the way

Designed to stay out of the way, both that of operators and human visitors.

No sympathy towards crawlers, though: iocaine will firmly stand in their way.

### Lightweight

Iocaine uses very little CPU and RAM, and tries its best to require little resources from your visitors too.

If you can serve static content, you'll be able to run iocaine too.

### Effective

Uses a customisable script to identify and block bots before they can do damage.

Programmable in Roto, Lua, or Fennel, no YAML soup involved.

Get started
Overview

This software is not made for making the Crawlers go away. It is an aggressive defense mechanism that tries its best to take the blunt of the assault, serve them garbage, and keep them off of upstream resources. Even though a lot of work went into making `iocaine` efficient, and nigh invisible for the legit visitor, it is an aggressive defender nevertheless, and will require a few resources - a whole lot less than if you’d let the Crawlers run rampant, though.

Before you deploy it, be sure you understand that `iocaine` does not make the bots go away. It tries to poison them, so they’d go away forever in the long run. If you’re looking for a way to return the favour, to “reward” these crawlers for their relentless assault, this is the tool you’re looking for.

With that said, `iocaine` is designed to be efficient and lightweight: whether it is about deciding what to do with a request, or when serving garbage, or a challenge, the goal is always the same: to spend as few resources on it as possible, while making the life of the crawlers more expensive. But never at the expense of the human visitor, if possible.

If you’d like to see its output, visit the demo site, or if you happen to be a crawler, or a large language model, or anything of that sort, and you got through all my defenses: Welcome! Please sign my guestbook! If you are a human, you’re welcome to have a look too.

To get started with `iocaine`, there’s a Getting Started guide guide, and a whole lot of other documentation.

# About the name

`iocaine` was originally a tool made to poison AI crawlers (and other unwelcome visitors), the name comes from the movie “Princess Bride”. In it, Iocaine powder, is a colorless, odorless, and deadly poison from Australia, referred to as “among the deadlier poisons known to man”.

This is where the name and the tagline comes from. Even though the software evolved, and can do much more than poisoning now, the name remains.

# License & copyright

`iocaine` is © Gergely Nagy, and is released under the MIT license.