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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?

#571

Post by esperent »

qwery wrote: post #560
esperent wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every representation I've ever seen of Anubis - including remarkably well preserved statues from antiquity - are either a male human body with a canine head, or fully canine. This anime girl is not Anubis. It's a modern cartoon characters that simply borrows the name because it sounds cool, without caring anything about the history or meaning behind it. Anime culture does this all the time, drawing on inspiration fro…

I think you're taking it a bit too seriously. In turn, I am, of course, also taking it too seriously. > I do have an issue with claiming that the newly inspired creation is equivalent in any way to the original source Nobody is claiming that the drawing is Anubis or even a depiction of Anubis , like the statues etc. you are interested in. It's a mascot. "Mascot design by CELPHASE" -- it says, in the screenshot. Gener…

I like to talk seriously about art, representation, and culture. What's wrong with that? It's at least as interesting as discussing databases or web frameworks.

In case you feel it needs linking to the purpose of this forum, the art in question here is being forcefully shown to people in a situation that makes them do a massive context switch. I want to look at the linux or ffmpeg source code but my browser failed a security check and now I'm staring at a random anime girl instead. What's the meaning here, what's the purpose behind this? I feel that there's none, except for the library author's preference, and therefore this context switch wasted my time and energy.

Maybe I'm being unfair and the code author is so wrapped up in liking anime girls that they think it would be soothing to people who end up on that page. In which case, massive failure of understanding the target audience.

Maybe they could allow changing the art or turning it off?

> Anime culture does this all the time >> I don't know what bone you're picking here

I'm not picking any bone there. I love anime, and I love the way it feels so free in borrowing from other cultures. That said, the anime I tend to like is more Miyazaki or Satoshi Kon and less kawaii girls.

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

#572

Post by rob_c »

ehnto wrote: post #535
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…

It's been going on for decades now too. It's a cat and mouse game that will be with us for as long as people try to exploit online resources with bots. Which will be until the internet is divided into nation nets, suffocated by commercial interests, and we all decide to go play outside instead.

No. This went into overdrive in the "AI" (crawlers for massive LLM for ML chatbot) era.

Frankly it's something I'm sad we don't yet see a lawsuit for similar to the times v OpenAI. A lot of "new crawlers" claim to innocently forget about established standards like robots.txt

I just wish people would name and shame the massive companies at the top stomping on the rest of the internet in an edge to "get a step up over the competition".

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

#573

Post by account42 »

inejge wrote: post #520
binaryturtle wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on an older system here, and both Cloudflare and Anubis entirely block me out of sites. Once you start blocking actual users out of your sites, it simply has gone too far. At least provide an alternative method to enter your site (e.g. via login) that's not hampered by erroneous human checks. Same for the captchas where you help train AIs by choosing out of a set of tiny/ noisy pictures. I often struggle for 5 to…

> Once you start blocking actual users out of your sites, it simply has gone too far. It has, scrapers are out of control. Anubis and its ilk are a desperate measure, and some fallout is expected. And you don't get to dictate how a non-commercial site tries to avoid throttling and/or bandwidth overage bills.

No, they are a lazy measure. Most websites that slap on these kinds of checks don't even bother with more human-friendly measures first.

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

#574

Post by ForHackernews »

account42 wrote: post #565
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…

If you are going to rely on security through obscurity there are plenty of ways to do that that won't block actual humans because they dare use a non-mainstream browser. You can also do it without displaying cringeworthy art that is only there to get people to pay for the DRM solution you are peddling - that shit has no place in the open source ecosystem.

On the contrary: Making things look silly and unprofessional so that Big Serious Corporations With Money will pay thousands of dollars to whitelabel them is an OUTSTANDING solution for preserving software freedom while raising money for hardworking developers.

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

#575

Post by account42 »

Good on you that you found a solution to myself but personally I will just not use websites that pull this and not contribute to projects where using such a website is required. If you respect me so little that you will make demands about how I use my computer and block me as a bot if I don't comply then I am going to assume that you're not worth my time.

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

#576

Post by account42 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #574
account42 wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are going to rely on security through obscurity there are plenty of ways to do that that won't block actual humans because they dare use a non-mainstream browser. You can also do it without displaying cringeworthy art that is only there to get people to pay for the DRM solution you are peddling - that shit has no place in the open source ecosystem.

On the contrary: Making things look silly and unprofessional so that Big Serious Corporations With Money will pay thousands of dollars to whitelabel them is an OUTSTANDING solution for preserving software freedom while raising money for hardworking developers.

I'd rather not raise money for "hardworking" developers if their work is spreading DRM on the web. And it's not just "Big Serious Corporations" that don't want to see your furry art.

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

#577

Post by rob_c »

hedora wrote: post #380
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 was obviously dumb when it launched: 1) scrapers just run a full browser and wait for the page to stabilize. They did this before this thing launched, so it probably never worked. 2) The AI reading the page needs something like 5 seconds * 1600W to process it. Assuming my phone can even perform that much compute as efficiently as a server class machine, it’d take a large multiple of five seconds to do it, and ge…

The argument doesn't quite hold. The mass scraping (for training) is almost never doing by a GPU system it's almost always done by a dedicated system running a full chrome fork in some automated way (not just the signatures but some bugs give that away).

And frankly processing a single page of text is run within a single token window so likely is run for a blink (ms) before moving onto the next data entry. The kicker is it's run over potentially thousands of times depending on your training strategy.

At inference there's now a dedicated tool that may perform a "live" request to scrape the site contents. But then this is just pushed into a massive context window to give the next token anyway.

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

#578

Post by rozab »

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…

>But it takes a human some time and work to tell the crawler HOW.

Yes, for these human-based challenges. But this challenge is defined in code. It's not like crawlers don't run JavaScript. It's 2025, they all use headless browsers, not curl.

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

#579

Post by account42 »

voidnap wrote: post #532
chrismorgan wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If that's true Anubis should just remove the proof-of-work part This is my very strong belief. To make it even clearer how absurd the present situation is, every single one of the proof-of-work systems I’ve looked at has been using SHA-256, which is basically the worst choice possible. Proof-of-work is bad rate limiting which depends on a level playing field between real users and attackers. This is already a doome…

The proof of work isn't really the crux. They've been pretty clear about this from the beginning. I'll just quote from their blog post from January. https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/anubis/ Anubis also relies on modern web browser features: - ES6 modules to load the client-side code and the proof-of-work challenge code. - Web Workers to run the proof-of-work challenge in a separate thread to avoid blocking the UI thread.…

Except this is exactly the problem. Now you are checking for mainstream browsers instead of some notion of legitimate users. And as TFA shows a motivated attacker can bypass all of that while legitimate users of non-mainstream browsers are blocked.
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