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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?

#641

Post by dijit »

pjc50 wrote: post #582
ehnto wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 oppo…

Not necessarily, Yggdrasil flies under the radar because it's inherently hard to block.

Tor even more so, the power of Tor is that the more people use it: the stronger it becomes to centralised adversaries.

The main issue with Tor is the performance of it though.

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

#642

Post by rfoo »

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 when you do not crawl with a browser at all. It's so trivial to solve just like the taviso post demostrated.

This makes zero sense, this is simply the wrong approach. Already tired of saying so and been attacked. So I'm glad professional-random-Internet-bullshit-ignorer Tavis Ormandy wrote this one.

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

#643

Post by petralithic »

ehnto wrote: post #537
dijit wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The annoying thing about cloudflare is that most of the time once you’re blocked: you’re blocked. There’s literally no way for you to bypass the block if you’re affected. Its incredibly scary, I once had a bad useragent (without knowing it) and half the internet went offline, I couldn’t even access documentation or my email providers site, and there was no contact information or debugging information to help me resol…

Now imagine your government provided internet agent gets blacklisted because your linked social media post was interpreted by an LLM to be anti-establishment, and we are painting a picture of our current trajectory.

I don't have to imagine

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

#644

Post by account42 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #596
account42 wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not commenting on the value of this project (I wouldn't characterize captchas as DRM, but I see why you have that negative connotation) and I tend to agree with the OP that this is simply wasting energy, but the amount of seething over "anime catgirls" makes me want to write all the docs for my next projects in UwU text and charge for a whimsy-free version. (o˘◡˘o)

Please do, it's better if people make their negative personality traits public so that you can avoid them before wasting your time. It will also be useful to show your hypocrisy when you inevitably complain about someone else doing something that you don't like.

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

#645

Post by throwawayffffas »

dale_glass wrote: post #583
seba_dos1 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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.…

It's not really hijacked computers, there is a whole market for vpns with residential exit nodes.

The way i think it works is they provide free VPN to the users or even pay their internet bill and then sell the access to their ip.

The client just connects to a vpn and has a residential exit IP.

The cost of the VPN is probably higher than the cost for the proof of work though.

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

#646

Post by octo888 »

armada651 wrote: post #615
ChrisRR wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming the aversion is more about why young anime girls are popping up, not about what animal it is

Why is there an aversion though? Is it about the image itself or because of the subculture people are associating with the image?

It's an aversion to the sexualised depiction of girls barely the age of puberty or under the age of consent.

I'd ask why you /don't/ have an aversion to that?

(yes, "not all anime" etc...)

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

#647

Post by 63stack »

palata wrote: post #510
john01dav wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has quite nasty consequences for privacy. For this reason, alternatives are desirable. I have less confidence on what such an alternative should be, however.

Can you elaborate on that? Are you implying that it is strictly impossible to do this in a privacy-preserving way?

While the question of "is it actually possible to do this in a privacy preserving way?" is certainly interesting, was there ever a _single_ occasion where a government had the option of doing something in a privacy preserving way, when a non-privacy preserving way was also possible? Politicians would absolutely kill for the idea of unmasking dissenters on internet forums. Even if the option is a possibility, they are deliberately not going to implement it.

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

#648

Post by mschuster91 »

account42 wrote: post #636
mschuster91 wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I don't have the fucking time to deal with AI scraper bots. I went harder - anything even looking suspiciously close to a scraper that's not on Google's index [1] or has wget in its user agent gets their entire /24 hard banned for a month, with an email address to contact for unbanning. That seems to be a pretty effective way for now to keep scrapers, spammers and other abusive behavior away. Normal users don…

> Normal users don't do certain site actions at the speed that scraper bots do How would you know when you have already banned them.

Simple. A honeypot link in a three levels deep menu which no ordinary human would care about that, thanks to a JS animation, needs at least half a second for a human to click on. Any bot that clicks it in less than half a second gets the banhammer. No need for invasive tracking, third party integrations, whatever.

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

#649

Post by rfoo »

Almondsetat wrote: post #443
sugarpimpdorsey wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Scrapers are orders of magnitude faster than humans at browsing websites. If the challenge takes 1 second but a human stays on the page for 3 minutes, then it's negligible. But if the challenge takes 1 second and the scraper does ita job in 5 seconds, you already have a 20% slowdown

Scrapers do not care about having a 20% slowdown. All they care is being able to scale up. This does not block any scale up attempt.

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

#650

Post by account42 »

TZubiri wrote: post #500
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…

As I understand it, this is Proof of Work, which is strictly not a mouse and cat situation.

It is because you are dealing with crawlers that already have a nontrivial cost per page, adding something relatively trivial that is still within the bounds regular users accept won't change the motivations of bad actors at all.
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