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

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

#191

Post by tonymet »

So it's a paywall with -- good intentions -- and even more accessibility concerns. Thus accelerating enshittification.

Who's managing the network effects? How do site owners control false positives? Do they have support teams granting access? How do we know this is doing any good?

It's convoluted security theater mucking up an already bloated , flimsy and sluggish internet. It's frustrating enough to guess schoolbuses every time I want to get work done, now I have to see porfnified kitty waifus

(openwrt is another community plagued with this crap)

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

#192

Post by throwawayffffas »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #140
johnecheck wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, touching the user-agent header more or less instantly makes you uniquely identifiable. Browser fingerprinting works best against people with unique headers. There's probably millions of people using an untouched safari on iPhone. Once you touch your user-agent header, you're likely the only person in the world with that fingerprint.

I wouldn’t think the intention is to s/Mozilla// but to select another well-known UA string.

I don't think there are any.

Because servers would serve different content based on user agent virtually all browsers start with Mozilla/5.0...

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

#193

Post by hiccuphippo »

debugnik wrote: post #121
leumon wrote: 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.

Too bad the challenge's result is only a waste of electricity. Maybe they should do like some of those alt-coins and search for prime numbers or something similar instead.

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

#194

Post by Dylan16807 »

Macha wrote: post #48
majorchord wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI companies use residential proxies Source:

Source: Cloudflare https://blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-is-using-stealth-unde... Perplexity's defense is that they're not doing it for training/KB building crawls but for answering dynamic queries calls and this is apparently better.

Well yes it is better. It's a page load triggered by a user for their own processing.

If web security worked a little differently, the requests would likely come from the user's browser.

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

#195

Post by throwawayffffas »

zahlman wrote: post #92
Arnavion wrote: post #45

>This dance to get access is just a minor annoyance for me, but I question how it proves I’m not a bot. These steps can be trivially and cheaply automated. >I think the end result is just an internet resource I need is a little harder to access, and we have to waste a small amount of energy. No need to mimic the actual challenge process. Just change your user agent to not have "Mozilla" in it; Anubis only serves you…

> Just change your user agent to not have "Mozilla" in it. Anubis only serves you the challenge if you have that. Won't that break many other things? My understanding was that basically everyone's user-agent string nowadays is packed with a full suite of standard lies.

In 2025 I think most of the web has moved on from checking user strings. Your bank might still do it but they won't be running Anubis.

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

#196

Post by throwawayffffas »

debugnik wrote: post #109
bakugo wrote: 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…

> That's what it's for, isn't it? Make crawling slower and more expensive.

The default settings produce a computational cost of milliseconds for a week of access. For this to be relevant it would have to be significantly more expensive to the point it would interfere with human access.

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

#197

Post by themafia »

jimmaswell wrote: post #12

What exactly is so bad about AI crawlers compared to Google or Bing? Is there more volume or is it just "I don't like AI"?

If you want my help training up your billion dollar model then you should pay me. My content is for humans. If you're not a human you are an unwelcome burden.

Search engines, at least, are designed to index the content, for the purpose of helping humans find it.

Language models are designed to filch content out of my website so it can reproduce it later without telling the humans where it came from or linking them to my site to find the source.

This is exactly the reason that "I just don't like 'AI'." You should ask the bot owners why they "just don't like appropriate copyright attribution."

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

#198

Post by codedokode »

johnecheck wrote: post #136
Arnavion wrote: post #45

>This dance to get access is just a minor annoyance for me, but I question how it proves I’m not a bot. These steps can be trivially and cheaply automated. >I think the end result is just an internet resource I need is a little harder to access, and we have to waste a small amount of energy. No need to mimic the actual challenge process. Just change your user agent to not have "Mozilla" in it; Anubis only serves you…

Sadly, touching the user-agent header more or less instantly makes you uniquely identifiable. Browser fingerprinting works best against people with unique headers. There's probably millions of people using an untouched safari on iPhone. Once you touch your user-agent header, you're likely the only person in the world with that fingerprint.

If your headers are new every time then it is very difficult to figure out who is who.

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

#199

Post by throwawayffffas »

hiccuphippo wrote: post #183
shkkmo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wasn't sha256 designed to be very fast to generate? They should be using bcrypt or something similar.

Unless they require a new token for each new request or every x minutes or something it won't matter.

And as the poster mentioned if you are running an AI model you probably have GPUs to spare. Unlike the dev working from a 5 year old Thinkpad or their phone.

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

#200

Post by xandrius »

serf wrote: post #133

I don't care that they use anime catgirls. What I do care about is being met with something cutesy in the face of a technical failure anywhere on the net . I hate Amazon's failure pets, I hate google's failure mini-games -- it strikes me as an organizational effort to get really good at failing rather than spending that same effort to avoid failures all together. It's like everyone collectively thought the standard o…

The original versions were a way to make fun even a boring event such as a 404. If the page stops conveying the type of error to the user then it's just bad UX but also vomiting all the internal jargon to a non-tech user is bad UX.

So, I don't see an error code + something fun to be that bad.

People love dreaming of the 90s wild web and hate the clean cut soulless corp web of today, so I don't see how having fun error pages to be such an issue?

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