Blocking LLM scrapers on Alibaba Cloud from your nginx configuration

There are currently LLM scrapers running off many Alibaba Cloud IPs, that ignore robots.txt and pretend to be desktop browsers. They also generate absurd request rates, to the point of being basically a DDoS attack. One way to deal with them is to simply block all of Alibaba Cloud.

This will also block legitimate users of Alibaba Cloud!

Here's how you can block them:

1. Generate a deny entry list at https://www.enjen.net/asn-blocklist/index.php?asn=45102&type=nginx
   
2. Add the entries to your nginx configuration. It goes directly in the server { ... } block.

On NixOS

If you're using Nix or NixOS, you can keep the deny list in a separate file, which makes it easier to maintain and won't clutter up your nginx configuration as much. It would look something like this:

services.nginx.virtualHosts.<name>.extraConfig = ''
  ${import ./alibaba-blocklist.nix}
  # other config goes here
''

... where you replace <name> with the name of your hostname.