Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lock.cmpxchg8b.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 968 posts

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

#411

Post by weberer »

bhawks wrote: post #306
overfeed wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bots will eventually be indistinguishable from humans Not until they get issued government IDs they won't! Extrapolating from current trends, some form of online ID attestation (likely based on government-issued ID[1]) will become normal in the next decade, and naturally, this will be included in the anti-bot arsenal. It will be up to the site operator to trust identities signed by the Russian government. 1. De…

Can't wait to sign into my web browser with my driver's license.

What's next? Requiring a license to make toast in your own damn toaster?

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

#412

Post by eqvinox »

TFA — and most comments here — seem to completely miss what I thought was the main point of Anubis: it counters the crawler's "identity scattering"/sybil'ing/parallel crawling.

Any access will fall into either of the following categories:

- client with JS and cookies. In this case the server now has an identity to apply rate limiting to, from the cookie. Humans should never hit it, but crawlers will be slowed down immensely or ejected. Of course the identity can be rotated — at the cost of solving the puzzle again.

- amnesiac (no cookies) clients with JS. Each access is now expensive.

(- no JS - no access.)

The point is to prevent parallel crawling and overloading the server. Crawlers can still start an arbitrary number of parallel crawls, but each one costs to start and needs to stay below some rate limit. Previously, the server would collapse under thousands of crawler requests per second. That is what Anubis is making prohibitively expensive.

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

#413

Post by creatonez »

Lammy wrote: post #175
sugarpimpdorsey wrote: post #93

Every time I see one of these I think it's a malicious redirect to some pervert-dwelling imageboard. On that note, is kernel.org really using this for free and not the paid version without the anime? Linux Foundation really that desperate for cash after they gas up all the BMW's?

[flagged]

Anubis has nothing to do with Kiwiflare, there's no connection at all. It's not the same codebase, and the inspiration for Anubis comes from Hashcash (1997) and numerous other examples of web PoW that predate Kiwiflare, which perhaps tens of thousands of websites were already using as an established technique. What makes you think it is a clone of it?

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

#414

Post by scratchyone »

tjhorner wrote: post #30
VMG wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

crawlers can run JS, and also invest into running the Proof-Of-JS better than you can

Anubis doesn't target crawlers which run JS (or those which use a headless browser, etc.) It's meant to block the low-effort crawlers that tend to make up large swaths of spam traffic. One can argue about the efficacy of this approach, but those higher-effort crawlers are out of scope for the project.

wait but then why bother with this PoW system at all? if they're just trying to block anyone without JS that's way easier and doesn't require slowing things down for end users on old devices.

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

#415

Post by silversmith »

amarant wrote: post #339
agwa wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're saying that it's not the proof-of-work that's stopping AI scrapers, but the fact that Anubis imposes an unusual flow to load the site. If that's true Anubis should just remove the proof-of-work part, so legitimate human visitors don't have to stare at a loading screen for several seconds while their device wastes electricity.

I feel like the future will have this, plus ads displayed while the work is done, so websites can profit while they profit.

Every now and then I consider stepping away from the computer job, and becoming a lumberjack. This is one of those moments.

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

#416

Post by bananalychee »

pilif wrote: post #400
bananalychee wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it actually? I don't think I've seen a case study with hard numbers.

Here’s one study https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/81... And of all the high-profile projects implementing it, like the LKML archives, none have backed down yet, so I’m assuming the initial improvement in numbers must continue or it would have been removed since

Great, thanks for the link.

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

#417

Post by kjkjadksj »

cakealert wrote: post #276
johnklos wrote: post #244

This is a usually technical crowd, so I can't help but wonder if many people genuinely don't get it, or if they are just feigning a lack of understanding to be dismissive of Anubis. Sure, the people who make the AI scraper bots are going to figure out how to actually do the work. The point is that they hadn't, and this worked for quite a while. As the botmakers circumvent, new methods of proof-of-notbot will be made…

This arms race will have a terminus. The bots will eventually be indistinguishable from humans. Some already are.

Maybe there will be a way to certify humanness. Human testing facility could be a local office you walk over to get your “I am a human” hardware key. Maybe it expires after a week or so to ensure that you are still alive.

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

#418

Post by heavyset_go »

jimmaswell wrote: post #354
themafia wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> copyright attribution You can't copyright an idea, only a specific expression of an idea. An LLM works at the level of "ideas" (in essence - for example if you subtract the vector for "woman" from "man" and add the difference to "king" you get a point very close to "queen") and reproduces them in new contexts and makes its own connections to other ideas. It would be absurd for you to demand attribution and payment…

LLMs quite literally work at the level of their source material, that's how training works, that's how RAG works, etc.

There is no proof that LLMs work at the level of "ideas", if you could prove that, you'e solve a whole lot of incredibly expensive problems that are current bottlenecks for training and inference.

It is a bit ironic that you'd call someone wanting to control and be paid for the thing they themselves created "selfish", while at the same time writing apologia on why it's okay for a trillion dollar private company to steal someone else's work for their own profit.

It isn't some moral imperative that OpenAI gets access to all of humanity's creations so they can turn a profit.

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

#419

Post by thayne »

mlyle wrote: post #379
technion wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really should be recognised just how many people are watching Cloudflare interstitials on nearly every site these days (and I totally get why this happens) yet making a huge amount of noise about Anubis on a very small amount of sites.

I don't trip over CloudFlare except when in a weird VPN, and then it always gets out of my way after the challenge. Anubis screws with me a lot, and often doesn't work.

I get one basically every time I go to gitlab.com on Firefox.

It is easy to pass the challange, but it isn't any better than Anubis.

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

#420

Post by heavyset_go »

ranger_danger wrote: post #40
immibis wrote: 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…

There's an angle where criminal intent doesn't matter when it comes to negligence and damages. They have to had known that their scrapers would cause denial of service, unauthorized access, increased costs for operators, etc.
Post reply on HN