It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis • Hacker News Board

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#191

Post by JodieBenitez » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

account42 wrote: post #183

JodieBenitez wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a fan of Anubis for various reasons but the idea that bot traffic in only harmful with dynamic pages must die. CPU (yes, even to serve static pages) is not free, bandwidth is definitely not free. There's an idea that serving a static page to a bot has a marginal cost tending to zero, but it's never really zero and serving them by millions definitely has a cost. Also, while some pages may look like static HTML…

> Also, while some pages may look like static HTML pages, they may be generated on the fly by an expensive and/or slow backend Yes and that should be fixed before you subject real users to resource-wasting scripts.

It can't always be fixed. Also, I don't use Anubis.

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#192

Post by Plont » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

DrammBA wrote: post #165

xena wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to be rude, but please search "wasm2js" in the article.

Some times it's okay to mean it.

This is not one of those times.

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#193

Post by fwip » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 6:11 PM UTC

bakugo wrote: post #102

fwip wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you force a low end device to burn CPU or fill ram constantly, the owner throws it out and buys a new one.

Haha, no. The average tech illiterate person tolerates a LOT when it comes to bad performance on low end devices.

The malware already results in noticeable slowdown just running the scraper. Solving anubis challenges is significantly more difficult than simply requesting the page, so it is not feasible on-device without making the device totally unusable.

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#194

Post by zamalek » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 6:22 PM UTC

> It also means that the "hey Claude vibeslop me a CUDA Anubis solver" route is on its way to being fundamentally dead.

Would there be any risk in making a dynamically built algorithm (i.e. the risk that we don't find N zero prefix bits)? Chain a set of transforms and build a unique WASM binary (including optimizations to deter pattern matching); possibly one a day or hour or something. That way you'd need to have Claude vibeslop the CUDA implementation at that cadence, per website.

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#195

Post by zamadatix » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 6:23 PM UTC

swiftcoder wrote: post #148

doctor_radium wrote: post #103

I have every copy of Firefox here configured with webassembly disabled...because I don't tend to do what Webassembly was designed for, i.e. online games, video/audio editing, emulation, etc. [1] and because I dislike things running in the background without my knowledge. So this is going to be interesting. My plea (in a small voice) to the OP: just as many sites still do for JavaScript, please add a "This captcha req…

> because I dislike things running in the background without my knowledge Point of order: WASM doesn't let things run in the background. To do that you need WebWorkers (a javascript feature, not WASM-specific).

Two different kinds of "background". GP is talking about what indications they get a page is running arbitrary code as they load it, (some of) web workers is about persisting running that code after it's loaded. It can be in the "background" for both or neither, depending on the context, and both meanings are valid.

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#196

Post by zamalek » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 6:26 PM UTC

andai wrote: post #115

Tangential but all the pages I see protected by Anubis are just static HTML. But bot traffic is only harmful on dynamic pages right?

It protects the content from being hoovered up into an LLM without credit or attribution. Anti-DOS is only half the story.

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#197

Post by xena » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 6:28 PM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #194

> It also means that the "hey Claude vibeslop me a CUDA Anubis solver" route is on its way to being fundamentally dead. Would there be any risk in making a dynamically built algorithm (i.e. the risk that we don't find N zero prefix bits)? Chain a set of transforms and build a unique WASM binary (including optimizations to deter pattern matching); possibly one a day or hour or something. That way you'd need to have Cl…

This is exactly what I've been working on. For obvious reasons around it not being done yet, I don't have anything else to say.

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#198

Post by packetlost » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 6:47 PM UTC

JsonCameron wrote: post #96

packetlost wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you could convince the Anubis author to implement x402 payments to bypass the PoW

This could be done at the web server level, not requiring changes to Anubis

It could be, but if it's a few lines of config in Anubis it would be easier and more likely to actually be done.

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#199

Post by yencabulator » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 6:54 PM UTC

  enum error {
    no-error,

Huh? Isn't that covered by `result`? Sounds like you should take that out and return `result` from `write-verification`.

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#200

Post by joquarky » Mon, Sep 07, 2026, 7:05 PM UTC

vintagedave wrote: post #32

> In my experience the kinds of people who run this exact combination of circumstances also tend to be the kind of people that have a wide variance in the level of kindness they display to the authors of open source programs that happen to be in their way. Love this. There’s been past discussion on HN re how OSS maintainers are treated, and this is such a wry sentence. I really appreciate the tone / attitude to the p…

Same goes for a job writing closed source. This whole industry has gone off a cliff.