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- Using a terribly inefficient way to redownload the same commits as e.g. HTML diffs, possibly the most inefficient.
- Putting in tons of CPU cycles to surpass the Anubis PoC.
- Putting in other kinds of active effort like reworking access methods and buying "residential proxies" that are probably illegal in most jurisdictions.
This sounds more like escalating DDoS than AI scraping.
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The better solution would be fix Anubis and optimise its calculations on iPhone. Maybe it needs WebAssembly hashing implementation instead of JS? But it would just make Anubis suck a little bit less Anubis "protection" model is wrong/broken on several levels. I suppose it does not even have ability to bypass hashing screen when server load is low.
> I suppose it does not even have ability to bypass hashing screen when server load is low. Anubis is not a load optimizer. It's sole purpose is to deny the bots you don't want on your site. It's on the same category as Iocaine and Go-Away, even if what they do is different in some cases.
No, this very article will tell you that the purpose of Anubis is to reduce load on the site. The purpose of denying bot requests is that you're strained by the load they impose.
Conversely, bots that pose no problems to you aren't "the bots you don't want on your site".
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I too would love anubis to use better CS, if available. Perhaps you have some ideas for @xena, instead of just letting anubis continue on the trajectory of iterating its PoW approach?
Same here. But of course and as expected; 5 hours later, the GP comment offers no proper solutions for this "better computer science" they speak of. It shows they really don't care and they are just rage-baiting readers in their weekly grumpiness without any suggestions. Unless they come up with said "solution", they can completely ignored in their complaints.
> because apparently what we have to offer is worth spending a ton of cycles to calculate the Anubis challenge. This statement holds the core misapprehension behind Anubis. It’s not a ton of cycles. There is no difficulty setting that would be inconvenient for bots but usable for humans on mobile devices. I noticed the other day that lists.ffmpeg.org had moved to Anubis difficulty level 6, which takes ~180sec for my…
> I don’t see how proof of work could possibly be a sustainable strategy to keep bots out without ruining human user experience. Lots of work has been done to do just that by monero’s proof of work algorithm. They achieved ASIC and GPU resistance by making you generate entire programs (with quite a bit of RAM usage) and finding one that produces a desired output. Then you submit the seed used for the program (a serie…
Anubis wants "slow for bots but fast for humans" which is not possible if somebody has a farm of devices that costs them basically zero.
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(FYI, these are comically distorted on mobile.)
Direct may help autoresize for you: https://i.ibb.co/rGNcX8XN/Screenshot-2026-08-30-at-20-29-42.... - https://i.ibb.co/yBV78jTY/Screenshot-2026-08-30-at-20-29-59.... - https://i.ibb.co/twg0xv0K/Screenshot-2026-08-30-at-20-30-13.... No hot toaster pics though :( on second thought perhaps better in our imaginations
Tavis Ormandy called this, about Anubis, almost exactly a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962529 It never really cohered as a solution. High-powered scrapers are better equipped to handle proof-of-work challenges than end users. Proof of work makes sense for a password hash, where any one guess at a password provides zero marginal utility. But every request from a scraper is productive to the scraper…
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> In other words not a meaningful barrier. And yet many report it works, at least for now, and the excess load due to scraping activity falls precipitously when Anubis or similar solutions are used. Maybe once this sort of challenge is used almost everywhere we'll see concerted attempts to get around it, but for now it is easier for them to just move on to another target. > a $5000 ASIC-based device can hash SHA256 a…
You don’t need to spend $5000 to obtain the hash rate of a $5000 device on a rental basis. You may have heard of this thing called “the cloud”. Obtaining very high hash rates is effectively free, largely as a side effect of the crypto bust. Not sure why anyone would characterize these scrapers im general as all being fly-by-night operations that don’t have two cents to scrape together.
If they are so stupid an idea that they could never work, why do they seem to having the desired effect?
Ironically, defense by obscurity may be the way to go here. Fork Anubis. Slightly modify the hash function it computes. Deploy. Do not try to make your fork widely adopted. Do not even publish it. You've just defeated ASICs and any craweler that's special-cased Anubis (currently all of them). If enough people do this, the only recourse they will have is either genuinely executing served js code like a real user or bu…