I publish this blog because I like to communicate. I want people to read my stories, maybe even engage in conversation. Of course any public appearance can also attract the wrong kind of crowd. Especially on the internet, where about 70% of all traffic comes from bots, crawlers, scrapers, search engines, AI agents, hackers, scammers, spammers….. and only a few legitimate visitors.

My blog is protected with a premium security plugin and I watch the logs on a regular basis.

Lately I’ve seen a surge in visits from a user agent called “Bytespider”. That thing was trying to get onto my pages continuously, supposedly from Singapore. Thousands of blocked attempts every day. I was curious. Turns out that this is an AI scraper designed to train the Chinese LLM “DeepSeek”. I really don’t want to help feed any AI machine for free! So, even though none of these bad agents made it through my firewall (yet), I educated myself on a few other strange visitors to my webspace and hardened certain aspects of my WordPress backend.

A few more plugins installed, certain IP-ranges blocked, and voilá – less unwanted visitors.