Live data from Hacker News

Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

lock.cmpxchg8b.com

121–130 of 968 posts

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#121
post #77

Seems like ai bots are indeed bypassing the challenge by computing it: https://social.anoxinon.de/@Codeberg/115033790447125787

That's not bypassing it, that's them finally engaging with the PoW challenge as intended, making crawling slower and more expensive, instead failing to crawl at all, which is more of a plus.

This however forces servers to increase the challenge difficulty, which increases the waiting time for the first-time access.

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#122
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy ( especially considering anime is more popular now than ever; netflix alone is making billions a year on anime) that people see a completely innocent little anime picture and immediately think "pervent-dwelling imageboard".

Even if the images aren’t the kind of sexualized (or downright pornographic) content this implies… having cutesy anime girls pop up when a user loads your site is, at best, wildly unprofessional. (Dare I say “cringe”?) For something as serious and legit as kernel.org to have this, I do think it’s frankly shocking and unacceptable.

[deleted]

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#124
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why haven't they been sued and jailed for DDoS, which is a felony?

Criminal convictions in the US require a standard of proof that is "beyond a reasonable doubt" and I suspect cases like this would not pass the required mens rea test, as, in their minds at least (and probably a judge's), there was no ill intent to cause a denial of service... and trying to argue otherwise based on any technical reasoning (e.g. "most servers cannot handle this load and they somehow knew it") is IMO u…

coming from a different legal system so please forgive my ignorance: Is it necessary in the US to prove ill intent in order to sue for repairs? Just wondering, because when I accidentally punch someones tooth out, I would assume they certainly are entitled to the dentist bill.

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#125
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more likely that the project itself will disappear into irrelevance as soon as AI scrapers bother implementing the PoW (which is trivial for them, as the post explains) or figure out that they can simply remove "Mozilla" from their user-agent to bypass it entirely.

[flagged]

> PoW increases the cost for the bots which is great.

But not by any meaningful amount as explained in the article. All it actually does is rely on it's obscurity while interfering with legitimate use.

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sourcehut uses go-away, not Anubis.

https://sourcehut.org/blog/2025-04-15-you-cannot-have-our-us... > As you may have noticed, SourceHut has deployed Anubis to parts of our services to protect ourselves from aggressive LLM crawlers. Its nice that sourcehut themselves have talked about it on their own blog but I had discovered this through the anubis website themselves showcases or soemthing like that iirc.

Yes, your link from four months ago says they deployed Anubis. Now actually go to sourcehut yourself and you'll see it uses go-away, not Anubis. Or read the footnote at the bottom of your link (in fact, linked from the very sentence you quoted) that says they were looking at go-away at the time.

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#128
post #70
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have said, it's definitely volume, but also the lack of respecting robots.txt. Most AI crawlers that I've seen bombarding our sites just relentlessly scrape anything and everything, without even checking to see if anything has changed since the last time they crawled the site.

Yep, AI scrapers have been breaking our open-source project gerrit instance hosted at Linux Network Foundation. Why this is the case while web-crawlers have been scrapping the web for the last 30 years is a mystery to me. This should be a solved problem. But it looks like this field is full of wrongly behaving companies with complete disregards toward common goods.

>Why this is the case while web-crawlers have been scrapping the web for the last 30 years is a mystery to me.

a mix of ignorance, greed, and a bit of the tragedy of the commons. If you don't respect anyone around you, you're not going to care about any rules or ettiquite that don't directly punish you. Society has definitely broken down over the decades.

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#129
post #75

When I instantly read it, I knew it was anubis. I hope the anime catgirls never disapear from that project :)

It's more likely that the project itself will disappear into irrelevance as soon as AI scrapers bother implementing the PoW (which is trivial for them, as the post explains) or figure out that they can simply remove "Mozilla" from their user-agent to bypass it entirely.

Im not on Firefox or any Firefox derivative and I still get anime cat girls making sure I'm not a bot.

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#130
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more likely that the project itself will disappear into irrelevance as soon as AI scrapers bother implementing the PoW (which is trivial for them, as the post explains) or figure out that they can simply remove "Mozilla" from their user-agent to bypass it entirely.

> as AI scrapers bother implementing the PoW That's what it's for, isn't it? Make crawling slower and more expensive. Shitty crawlers not being able to run the PoW efficiently or at all is just a plus. Although: > which is trivial for them, as the post explains Sadly the site's being hugged to death right now so I can't really tell if I'm missing part of your argument here. > figure out that they can simply remove "M…

The explanation of how the estimate is made is more detailed, but here is the referenced conclusion:

>> So (11508 websites * 2^16 sha256 operations) / 2^21, that’s about 6 minutes to mine enough tokens for every single Anubis deployment in the world. That means the cost of unrestricted crawler access to the internet for a week is approximately $0.

>> In fact, I don’t think we reach a single cent per month in compute costs until several million sites have deployed Anubis.

Post reply on HN