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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?

#581

Post by ibejoeb »

JimDabell wrote: post #527
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…

> some form of online ID attestation (likely based on government-issued ID[1]) will become normal in the next decade I believe this is likely, and implemented in the right way, I think it will be a good thing. A zero-knowledge way of attesting persistent pseudonymous identity would solve a lot of problems. If the government doesn’t know who you are attesting to, the service doesn’t know your real identity, services c…

>A zero-knowledge way of attesting persistent pseudonymous identity

why would a government do that though? the alternative is easier and gives it more of what it wants.

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

#582

Post by pjc50 »

ehnto wrote: post #540
Dilettante_ wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "digital no-fly-list" is hella cyberpunk, though.

The question might become, what side of the black wall are you going to be on? Seriously though I do think we are going to see increasing interest in alternative nets, especially as governments tighten their control over the internet or even break away into isolated nation nets.

Paradoxically, the problem with an "alternative net" (which could be tunneled over the regular one) is keeping it alternative. It has to be kept small and un-influential in order to stay under the radar. If you end up with an "alternative" which is used by journalists and politicians, you've just reinvented the mainstream, and you're no longer safe from being hit by a policy response.

Think private trackers. The opposite of 4chan, which is an "alternative" that got too influential in setting the tone of the rest of the internet.

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

#583

Post by dale_glass »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #296
throwawayffffas wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

...unless you're sus, then the difficulty increases. And if you unleash a single scrapping bot, you're not a problem anyway. It's for botnets of thousands, mimicking browsers on residual connections to make them hard to filter out or rate limit, effectively DDoSing the server. Perhaps you just don't realize how much did the scraping load increase in the last 2 years or so. If your server can stay up after deploying A…

How is it going to hurt those?

If it's an actual botnet, then it's hijacked computers belonging to other people, who are the ones paying the power bills. The attacker doesn't care that each computer takes a long time to calculate. If you have 1000 computers each spending 5s/page, then your botnet can retrieve 200 pages/s.

If it's just a cloud deployment, still it has resources that vastly outstrip a normal person's.

The fundamental issue is that you can't serve example.com slower than a legitimate user on a crappy 10 year old laptop could tolerate, because that starts losing you real human users. So if let's say say user is happy to wait 5 seconds per page at most, then this is absolutely no obstacle to a modern 128 core Epyc. If you make it troublesome to the 128 core monster, then no normal person will find the site usable.

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

#584

Post by Tmpod »

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

I run a service under the protection of go-away[0], which is similar to Anubis, and can attest it works very well, still. Went from constant outages due to ridiculous volumes of requests to good load times for real users and no bad crawlers coming through.

[0]: https://git.gammaspectra.live/git/go-away

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

#585

Post by Tmpod »

kaszanka wrote: post #338
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.

This is basically what most of the challenge types in go-away ( https://git.gammaspectra.live/git/go-away/wiki/Challenges ) do.

+1 for go-away. It's a bit more involved to configure, but worth the effort imo. It can be considerably more transparent to the user, triggering the nuclear PoW check less often, while being just as effective, in my experience.

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

#586

Post by dale_glass »

nemomarx wrote: post #160
Gibbon1 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best response to AI scrapers is to poison their models.

how well is modern poisoning holding up?

To the best of my knowledge, it never really worked.

Yes, it probably works in the lab, in carefully picked conditions, but in the wild I've yet to see any effect whatsoever. Nobody in the AI communities seems to be complaining about it, models keep getting better, and people even intentionally trained on poisoned images just to show it can be done.

IMO on the long end it's a complete dead end of a strategy. Models are many, poisoning can't target everything at once. Even effective poisoning can be just dealt with by finding the algorithm that doesn't care about it.

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

#587

Post by swores »

phito wrote: post #486
marcus_holmes wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this work, though? We can't just have "send me a picture of your ID" because that is pointlessly easy to spoof - just copy someone else's ID. So there must be some verification that you, the person at the keyboard, is the same person as that ID identifies. The UK is rapidly finding out that that is extremely difficult to do reliably. Video doesn't really work reliably on all cases, and still images are too e…

In Europe we have itsme. You link the phone app to your ID, then you can use it to scan QR codes to log into websites.

"In Europe" is technically true but makes it sound more widely used than I believe it to be... though maybe my knowledge is out of date.

Their website lists 24 supported countries (including some non-EU like UK and Norway, and missing a few of the 27 EU countries) - https://www.itsme-id.com/en-GB/coverage

But does it actually have much use outside of Belgium?

Certainly in the UK I've never come across anyone, government or private business, mentioning it - even since the law passed requiring many sites to verify that visitors are adults. I wouldn't even be familiar with the name if I hadn't learned about its being used in Belgium.

Maybe some other countries are now using it, beyond just Belgium?

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

#588

Post by mfost »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #196
debugnik wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I thought the point (which the article misses) is that a token gives you an identity, and an identity can be tracked and rate limited.

So a crawlers that goes very ethically and does very little strain on the server should indeed be able to crawl for a whole week on a cheap compute, one that hammers the server hard will not.

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

#589

Post by Tmpod »

JimDabell wrote: post #497
amarant wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

adCAPTCHA already does this: https://adcaptcha.com

This is a joke, right? The landing page makes it seem so.

I tried the captcha in their login page and it made the entire page, including the puzzle piece slider, run at 2 fps.

My god, we do really live in 2025.

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

#590

Post by eaglefield »

kldg wrote: post #398
pilif wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was obviously dumb when it launched: Yes. Obviously dumb but also nearly 100% successful at the current point in time. And likely going to stay successful as the non-protected internet still provides enough information to dumb crawlers that it’s not financially worth it to even vibe-code a workaround. Or in other words: Anubis may be dumb, but the average crawler that completely exhausting some sites resources…

does it work well? I run chromium controlled by playwright for scraping and typically make Gemini implement the script for it because it's not worth my time otherwise. -but I'm not crawling the Internet generally (which I think there is very little financial incentive to do; it's a very expensive process even ignoring Anubis et al); it's always that I want something specific and am sufficiently annoyed by lack of API…

Anubis is not meant to stop single endpoints from scraping. It's meant to make it harder for massive AI scrapers. The problematic ones evade rate limiting by using many different ip addresses, and make scraping cheaper on themselves by running headless. Anubis is specifically built to make that kind of scraping harder as i understand it.
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