Tom’s Hardware : Independent 3D modeling community Open3DLab has publicly warned that a web crawler, linked to the gaming platform Roblox, mapped « almost every project » on its website, along with sister sites SFMLab and SmutBase, downloading 145.5GB of data in the process. In a blog post, Open3DLab reports that « complete copies » of 1,027 files from 712 projects were sourced in the process, which it believes were taken for « AI training purposes. »
The blog post goes into the specifics of the incident, along with some changes that Open3DLab has made since to try and avoid a repeat. According to the post, Open3DLab’s staff noticed a crawler « making a large number of requests to our sites and download infrastructure » on October 18. The crawler used trellis2-data-sourcing/1.0 (3D foundation model research; [redacted]@roblox.com) as its user agent, with the data coming from a single Amazon AWS address. The crawler didn’t respect the site’s robots.txt file or Terms of Service, which explicitly forbid scraping. It also, according to the report, ignored creator licenses for the projects, which prohibit non-commercial use.
