Soon any attempt to actually do it would indicate you're a bot.
Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
301–310 of 968 posts
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#302This 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…
Respectfully, I think it's you missing the point here. None of this is to say you shouldn't use Anubis, but Tavis Ormandy is offering a computer science critique of how it purports to function. You don't have to care about computer science in this instance! But you can't dismiss it because it's computer science. Consider: An adaptive password hash like bcrypt or Argon2 uses a work function to apply asymmetric costs t…
A lot of these passive types of anti-abuse systems rely on the rather bold assumption that making a bot perform a computation is expensive, but isn't for me as an ordinary user.
According to whom or what data exactly?
AI operators are clearly well-funded operations and the amount of electricity and CPU power is negligible. Software like Anubis and nearly all its identical predecessors grant you access after a single "proof". So you then have free reign to scrape the whole site.
The best physical analogy are those shopping cart things where you have to insert a quarter to unlock the cart, and you presumably get it back when you return the cart.
The group of people this doesn't affect are the well-funded, a quarter is a small price to pay for leaving your cart in the middle of the parking lot.
Those that suffer the most are the ones that can't find a quarter in the cupholder so you're stuck filling your arms with groceries.
Would you be richer if they didn't charge you a quarter? (For these anti-bot tools you're paying the electric company, not the site owner.). Maybe. But if you're Scrooge McDuck who is counting?
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 erro…
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Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anubis is a clone of Kiwiflare, not an original work, so you're actually sort of half-right: Interesting. That itself appears to be a clone of haproxy-protection. I know there has also been an nginx module that does the same for some time. Either way, proof-of-work is by this point not novel. Everyone seems to have overlooked the more substantive point of my comment which is that it appears kernel.org cheaped out a…
> My point is, cough up a few bucks for a license you chiselers. You mean this one? https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/blob/main/LICENSE
No I mean this one:
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
Respectfully, I think it's you missing the point here. None of this is to say you shouldn't use Anubis, but Tavis Ormandy is offering a computer science critique of how it purports to function. You don't have to care about computer science in this instance! But you can't dismiss it because it's computer science. Consider: An adaptive password hash like bcrypt or Argon2 uses a work function to apply asymmetric costs t…
A lot of these passive types of anti-abuse systems rely on the rather bold assumption that making a bot perform a computation is expensive, but isn't for me as an ordinary user. According to whom or what data exactly? AI operators are clearly well-funded operations and the amount of electricity and CPU power is negligible. Software like Anubis and nearly all its identical predecessors grant you access after a single…
Right, that's the point of the article. If you can tune asymmetric costs on bots/scrapers, it doesn't matter: you can drive bot costs to infinity without doing so for users. But if everyone's on a level playing field, POW is problematic.
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
This arms race will have a terminus. The bots will eventually be indistinguishable from humans. Some already are.
> 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.
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#307This 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…
The problem is that 7 + 2 on a submission form only affects people who want to submit something, Anubis affects every user who wants to read something on your site
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#308>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…
wtf? how is this then better than a captcha or something similar?!
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#309Earlier 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.
If someone's out to uniquely identify your activity on the internet, your User-Agent string is going to be the least of your problems.
Not sure what you mean, as exactly this is happening currently on 99% of the web. Brought to you by: ads
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#310Seems 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.
this only holds through if the data to be accessed is less valuable than the computational cost. in this case, that is false and spending a few dollars to scrape data is more than worth.
reducing the problem to a cost issue is bound to be short sighted.