When Bot Traffic Crashes Your Blog Before APEC: What It Reveals About Korea's Rush to Become an AI Superpower

Investigation Update: Technical root cause identified for October 25 domain outage—bot traffic spike crashed Bear Blog’s reverse proxy server. But whether natural or malicious, it revealed something far more important: a global crisis of bot traffic decimating internet infrastructure, driven by the AI industry’s ruthless data scraping—the same AI industry Korea is betting $100 trillion to dominate.

Investigation Update: Technical Root Cause Identified

On October 28, Bear Blog’s developer provided technical findings on the October 25 domain outage that occurred 48 hours before APEC Economic Leaders’ Week:

Root Cause: Bot traffic spike crashed Bear Blog’s reverse proxy server (which handles all custom domains). This was not specific to our blog, but affected all Bear Blog custom domains globally.

Developer’s Conclusion:

“So while I can’t entirely rule out foul play, I’m quite certain that this is just terrible timing.”

The acknowledgment that “foul play cannot be ruled out” is significant—distinguishing intentional DDoS attacks from natural bot spikes requires forensic analysis beyond a small hosting platform’s capacity.

But whether the October 25 bot spike was natural or malicious, it revealed something far more important: a global crisis of bot traffic decimating internet infrastructure, driven by the AI industry’s ruthless data scraping—the same AI industry Korea is betting $100 trillion to dominate.

The Great Scrape: How AI Training is Breaking the Internet

Bear Blog’s March 2025 Warning

Six months before our October 25 outage, Bear Blog’s developer published a prescient analysis titled “The Great Scrape,” documenting how AI companies’ data collection was creating unintentional widespread DDoS attacks:

Key findings from March 2025:

Daily assault on infrastructure:

“Bear, and every other content host on the internet, has been affected”
“Bear is hit daily by bot networks requesting tens of thousands of pages in short time periods”
“Over the past 6 months… these scrapers are terrible netizens and have been taking down site-after-site”

Scraper behavior:

Only small portion identify themselves as AI scrapers (500,000+ requests blocked in 24 hours)
Majority disguise themselves as regular web browsers
Use multiple servers and IP addresses
“Completely ignore robots.txt and other self-regulation rules”
Some “cheekily identify themselves as Googlebot or Yandexbot”

Industry-wide crisis:

Sourcehut and LWN documented similar difficulties
“Big and small players alike” affected
Self-hosted bloggers forced to implement rate-limiting and CDNs
“This seems to be happening… on the internet”

The arms race:

Cloudflare releasing “AI Labyrinth” to trap scrapers in never-ending maze
“More tools are being released to combat this”
“This is how the arms race begins”

Korea’s $100 Trillion AI Bet: Speed Over Safety

While AI companies ruthlessly scrape the internet and crash infrastructure, South Korea is racing to become a “top three AI nation” by 2027—with institutional integrity concerns we’ve documented for six months.

The Numbers

Government commitment:

$100 trillion won ($72+ billion) over five years
By 2027: Top-three global AI ranking
National AI Computing Center: 15,000 advanced GPUs by 2027
One exaflop of computing power (rivaling China and US)
10.1 trillion won AI budget for 2026 (threefold increase from 2025’s 3.3 trillion)

Corporate alignment:

Five elite teams selected for “World Best LLM” development
Sovereign AI: “Build globally competitive models trained on domestic data”
Open-source policy to expand domestic AI ecosystem
GPU allocation: Over 50,000 units targeted

The OpenAI Partnership

October 1, 2025 - Just 24 Days Before Our Domain Outage:

Samsung, SK Hynix, and OpenAI announced strategic partnerships under OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate initiative:

Partnership scope:

Samsung & SK Hynix: Scale to 900,000 DRAM wafers/month (doubling global HBM capacity)
SK Telecom: Build “Stargate Korea” AI data center
Samsung C&T, Heavy Industries, SDS: Assess additional data center capacity
Government backing: Ministry of Science and ICT cooperation
President Lee Jae-myung: “A global partnership that will set the standard for the AI era”

Sam Altman’s praise:

“Korea has all the ingredients to be a global leader in AI—incredible tech talent, world-class infrastructure, strong government support, and a thriving AI ecosystem.”

Contrasting reality: Infrastructure failures and institutional capture

Altman’s praise of “world-class infrastructure” and “incredible tech talent” rings hollow against Korea’s documented reality just weeks after his statement:

Infrastructure crisis:

Late September 2025: Major government data center fire paralyzed 647 public services for a month—just before his October 1 partnership announcement
No hot-site backup despite Korea’s “IT powerhouse” claims
Same government that scolded Kakao for identical 2022 failure couldn’t apply standards to itself
Hankyoreh editorial: “Disruptions to government systems raises questions about Korea’s status as IT powerhouse”

Cybersecurity failures:

Korean companies and government agencies face constant hacking incidents
Systematic data loss and theft affecting telecom giants including KT
Customer data repeatedly compromised across major carriers
“Incredible tech talent” claim becomes far-fetched when basic security fails repeatedly

Institutional capture preventing accountability:

All infrastructure and tech talent mean nothing when institutional capture has captured institutions to the point where:

Criminal defamation law criminalizes truthful testimony, creating perfect omerta
Zero whistleblowers: Bosses taking everyone to hostess bars and room salons makes everyone complicit
Cannot report data center fires or AI safety risks: Legal and career retaliation for truth-telling
Press freedom suppressed: We documented LGBT military sexual violence posts censored on DC Inside
200 days of institutional silence: Witness testimony about Dongguk sexual violence on Xiaohongshu met with complete government/university silence

AI safety precedents ignored:

Korea’s track record suggests infrastructure strain won’t be the only problem:

Scatterlab/Luda chatbot scandal (2021): AI leaked personal information from Kakao Talk conversations into training data, outputting users’ PII in responses
Zeta app (2025): New AI app easily enticed to output erotica, large minor user base, zero safeguards
Government turning blind eye: Prioritizing “AI startup success stories” over user safety

Data integrity compromised by institutional capture:

Any data used for AI training is already skewed toward institutional reputation management rather than truth:

Defamation law extends to silencing victim testimony
Press operates under legal constraints favoring institutions over accountability
Training corpora will systematically exclude censored survivor testimony
AI systems trained on Korean data risk encoding institutional protection over accuracy

The real infrastructure risk:

Korea might end up:

Crashing domestic and foreign websites while aggressively scraping data for LLMs
Leaking PII into training data: Anyone with data on Korean servers risks having personal information appear in LLM responses (precedent: Luda chatbot)
Exporting alignment inversion: Systems optimized for institutional protection over safety
Ignoring robots.txt: Just as defamation law ignores truth, Korean scrapers may ignore internet commons standards

The irony compounded: Altman’s praise came just 24 days before bot traffic (potentially AI scraping-related) crashed infrastructure hosting documentation of institutional failures in Korean universities—revealing both infrastructure vulnerability and the systematic suppression of accountability that makes AI safety governance impossible in Korea’s captured institutional environment.

The Ethical Contradiction: OpenAI’s Troubling Direction

Adult Content Policy Reversal

October 27, 2025 - Korea Times:

“OpenAI’s Move to Allow Adult Content in ChatGPT Triggers Global Ethical Debate”

OpenAI announced it will allow adult content generation, triggering concerns about:

Deepfake pornography proliferation
Non-consensual intimate imagery
Sexual exploitation facilitation
Content moderation challenges

The timing: This policy shift was announced the same day APEC Leaders’ Week began in Gyeongju—where we’ve documented sexual violence cover-ups at Korean universities.

Korea’s response: None documented. Despite Korea’s $100 trillion AI partnership with OpenAI and government pledges to address the 61.5% sexual violence rate in arts programs, no official comment on OpenAI’s adult content policy.

Attacking AI Safety Advocates

October 17, 2025 - TechCrunch:

“Silicon Valley Spooks the AI Safety Advocates”

OpenAI has actively opposed AI safety regulation and criticized safety advocates, despite public statements about “ensuring AGI benefits all humanity.”

Pattern of behavior:

Lobbying against comprehensive AI safety legislation
Dismissing existential risk concerns
Prioritizing rapid deployment over safety testing
Attacking researchers raising safety concerns

Korea’s partnership: No evidence of independent AI safety oversight or conditions on OpenAI partnership.

The Governance Question: Can Korea Guarantee Integrity?

Institutional Capture We’ve Documented

For six months, we’ve documented systematic institutional failures in Korean universities:

Academic fraud:

40% of Dongguk University’s claimed Canadian partnerships falsified
Canadian university confirmed no partnership, requested anonymity to avoid “diplomatic complications”
UBC’s official partner page doesn’t list Dongguk among Korean partners

Sexual violence crisis:

Korean Women’s Development Institute 2020 report: 61.5% of female arts students experience sexual violence
Film programs scored 81/100 on sexual violence risk assessment
International student testimonies of harassment, discrimination, systematic cover-ups

Corporate-academic exploitation:

Entertainment CEOs appointed as faculty over students
“Quadruple dependency”: Academic authority + corporate internship control + industry gatekeeping + professional blacklisting
Legal threats within 24 hours of publication

Gyeongju campus exploitation:

Students forced to share “housing” with tourists
Campus president faces criminal prosecution
Documented 200+ days of institutional silence

The AI Researcher Integrity Question

If Korean institutions:

Falsify academic partnerships (40% fraud rate at Dongguk)
Cover up sexual violence (61.5% rate in arts programs)
Maintain 200+ days of silence on documented exploitation
Appoint entertainment industry CEOs as faculty over students
Issue legal threats against documentation of misconduct

Then how can Korea guarantee:

AI research integrity?
Ethical data collection practices?
Honest reporting of AI safety testing?
Transparent disclosure of AI capabilities and limitations?
Accountability for AI harms?

The Prestige Chase Problem

Korea’s AI strategy is driven by prestige:

“Top three AI nation by 2027”
“World Best LLM” project name
Comparison to China’s DeepSeek as motivation
“Global leader in AI” framing
Export of “AI nation package” (like nuclear power, smart cities)

Historical pattern:

QS-Korea Times university ranking scandal: Education ranking company promoted Korean universities as having “strongest potential of any nation” five months after receiving detailed documentation of institutional failures
Dongguk University partnership fraud: Falsified international partnerships for prestige
WISE campus prosecution: Prioritized reputation over student welfare

Question: When institutional prestige overrides integrity, what happens when AI researchers face similar pressures?

The Infrastructure Strain Question

Current AI Scraping Crisis

Bear Blog’s March 2025 documentation:

Daily bot attacks on content hosts globally
Tens of thousands of page requests in short periods
Infrastructure crashes affecting “big and small players alike”
RSS analytics completely broken by bot traffic
“Ruthlessly scraping every corner of the internet”
“More and more novel data” needed to train next-generation models
“This incentivizes these companies to ruthlessly scrape”

Korea’s Planned Capacity Expansion

If Korea achieves top-three AI status by 2027:

One exaflop computing power (National AI Computing Center)
15,000+ advanced GPUs operational
Five elite teams developing sovereign LLMs
900,000 DRAM wafers/month (doubling global HBM capacity)
Multiple AI data centers (SK Telecom “Stargate Korea” + Samsung floating data centers)

Question: How much additional internet infrastructure strain will Korea’s AI training create?

The multiplication effect:

Current AI scraping already crashes infrastructure daily
Korea expanding to “top three” capacity
Five domestic LLM projects requiring “novel data”
Sovereign AI policy: “Trained on domestic data” but also global competitiveness
OpenAI partnership: Contributing to $500 billion Stargate global infrastructure

Without ethical guardrails we’ve shown are lacking in Korean institutions, what prevents:

Korean AI projects from contributing to infrastructure-damaging scraping?
Aggressive data collection prioritizing speed over internet commons?
“Cheekily identifying as Googlebot” (as Bear Blog documented other scrapers doing)?
Ignoring robots.txt and self-regulation rules?
Racing to train LLMs regardless of collateral damage?

The Three-Part Pattern: Bot Traffic in Context

Our Documentation Remains

Regardless of October 25’s technical ambiguity:

October 7 (20 days before APEC):

APEC Secretariat liked our reply raising governance concerns
23 minutes later: Reply became invisible under APEC’s post
Between Oct 7-10: APEC removed their like (evidence cleanup)
Status: Unexplained institutional coordination

October 20 (7 days before APEC):

Two Substack posts inaccessible (APEC + Korea Herald coverage)
Substack status: “All Systems Operational” entire time
Restored within 10-25 minutes after public documentation
Substack never responded to transparency request
Status: Unexplained platform-level blocking

October 25 (48 hours before APEC):

Bot traffic spike crashed Bear Blog’s reverse proxy
Affected all custom domains (not specific to our blog)
Developer: “Can’t entirely rule out foul play” but “terrible timing”
Status: Technical cause confirmed, intentionality ambiguous

The pattern:

Three incidents in 18 days
All during APEC approach to Gyeongju (where we documented exploitation)
Escalating from social media to platform to infrastructure
October 25 incident occurs amid global AI scraping crisis
Korea announcing $100 trillion AI push with OpenAI partnership
OpenAI allowing adult content, attacking safety advocates

What This Reveals About AI Governance

The Uncomfortable Questions

Technical finding: Bot traffic crashed infrastructure.

Broader context: AI industry’s ruthless data scraping is crashing infrastructure globally, daily.

Korea’s response: $100 trillion bet to join the AI race, partnered with OpenAI.

OpenAI’s ethics: Allowing adult content, attacking safety advocates.

Korea’s institutional integrity: 40% academic partnership fraud, 61.5% sexual violence rate with systematic cover-ups, 200+ days of silence on documented exploitation.

Questions:

Can institutions that falsify academic partnerships be trusted to honestly report AI capabilities?
Can institutions that cover up 61.5% sexual violence rates be trusted to implement ethical AI safeguards?
Can institutions that maintain 200+ days of silence on documented exploitation be trusted to transparently address AI harms?
Can Korea guarantee AI research integrity when prestige (“top three by 2027”) drives strategy over safety?
What additional infrastructure strain will Korea’s AI expansion create in an already-breaking internet?
Why no official comment on OpenAI’s adult content policy from a government claiming to address sexual violence?
How does Korea’s OpenAI partnership square with OpenAI’s attacks on AI safety advocates?

The Governance Deficit

Korea’s AI strategy emphasizes:

Speed: “Top three by 2027”
Capacity: Threefold budget increase, massive infrastructure
Prestige: “World Best LLM,” “global leader”
Partnerships: OpenAI, Microsoft, major tech corporations

What’s missing:

Independent AI safety oversight
Ethical data collection standards
Accountability for institutional integrity failures
Conditions on partnerships with ethically-questionable companies
Transparency mechanisms for AI research misconduct
Protection for AI safety whistleblowers

The institutional capture pattern:

Universities falsify partnerships → QS-Korea Times promotes them anyway
Sexual violence crisis documented → 200+ days of institutional silence
Exploitation in APEC host city → students forced to share dorms with “random tourists”
OpenAI announces adult content policy → No official Korean response
Bot traffic crashes infrastructure → Korea expands AI capacity anyway

From Technical Incident to Governance Warning

What October 25 Really Showed

Surface level: Bot traffic crashed Bear Blog’s reverse proxy due to AI scraping epidemic.

Deeper level: The AI industry’s race for data is breaking internet infrastructure globally.

Deepest level: Korea is betting $100 trillion to join this race with:

Documented institutional integrity failures
No independent AI safety oversight
Partnership with OpenAI (adult content enabler, safety advocate attacker)
Prestige-driven timeline (“top three by 2027”) over safety
No ethical guardrails addressing institutional capture patterns

The Real Question

It’s not: “Was the October 25 bot spike natural or malicious?”

It’s: “In a world where AI scraping is already breaking infrastructure daily, what happens when Korea—with documented institutional integrity failures—attempts to become a top-three AI power?”

What We’re Calling For

1. Independent AI Safety Oversight

Korea’s AI strategy needs:

Independent ethics board (not dominated by chaebols)
Whistleblower protections for AI researchers
Transparent reporting of safety testing failures
Accountability mechanisms separate from prestige-driven government bodies

2. Ethical Data Collection Standards

Before expanding AI capacity:

Public commitment to respecting robots.txt
Infrastructure impact assessments
Contribution to global commons, not exploitation
Transparency about data sources and scraping practices

3. Institutional Integrity Prerequisites

Can’t guarantee AI research ethics without:

Addressing 40% academic partnership fraud rate
Ending 61.5% sexual violence crisis cover-ups
Responding to 200+ days of documented exploitation
Creating accountability for institutional failures

4. Partnership Conditions

OpenAI partnership should require:

Korean government comment on adult content policy
Conditions addressing OpenAI’s attacks on safety advocates
Independent review of partnership’s ethical implications
Exit clauses if OpenAI continues unsafe practices

5. Prestige vs. Safety Balance

“Top three by 2027” goal needs:

Safety milestones, not just capacity milestones
Integrity benchmarks, not just technical benchmarks
Accountability metrics, not just prestige metrics
Transparent reporting of failures, not just successes

Conclusion: The Bot Traffic Was a Warning

The Bear Blog representative’s investigation found bot traffic crashed our infrastructure. That’s the technical answer.

But the bot traffic itself is a symptom of the AI industry’s ruthless data collection—the same industry Korea is betting $100 trillion to join.

And Korea’s rush to “top three by 2027” status—with documented institutional integrity failures, no independent AI safety oversight, and partnerships with ethically-questionable companies—raises urgent governance questions.

The October 25 incident wasn’t just about our domain blocking.

It was about:

An internet breaking under AI scraping strain
A country racing to expand AI capacity despite institutional integrity failures
A $100 trillion bet prioritizing prestige over safety
A global need for AI governance that Korea’s current approach doesn’t address

Whether the October 25 bot spike was natural or malicious, it revealed a crisis:

AI development is proceeding faster than institutional integrity can keep up.

And in Korea’s case, institutional integrity was already failing before the AI race began.

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