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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?

#681

Post by account42 »

esperent wrote: post #469
ksymph wrote: post #15

This is neither here nor there but the character isn't a cat. It's in the name, Anubis, who is an Egyptian deity typically depicted as a jackal or generic canine, and the gatekeeper of the afterlife who weighs the souls of the dead (hence the tagline). So more of a dog-girl, or jackal-girl if you want to be technical.

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…

It's also that the anime style already makes all heads shaped vaguely like felines. Add upwards pointing furry ears and it's not wrong to call it a cat girl.

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

#682

Post by raxxorraxor »

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…

Everytime we need to deploy such mechanisms, you reward those that already crawled the data and you penalize newcomers and other honest crawlers.

For some sites Anubis might be fitting, but it should be mindfully deployed.

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

#683

Post by mewpmewp2 »

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

By that logic you could just make your website in general load slower to make scraping harder.

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

#684

Post by celphase »

esperent wrote: post #571
qwery wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hey there! The design of the mascot serves a dual-purpose, and was done very intentionally.

Your workflow getting interrupted, especially with a full-screen challenge page, is a very high-stress event. The mascot serves a purpose in being particularly distinct and recognizable, but also disarming for first-time users. This emotional response was calibrated particularly for more non-technical users who would be quick to be worried about 'being hit by a virus'. In particular I find that bot challenges tend to feel very accusing ("PROVE! PROVE YOU ARE NOT A ROBOT!"), and that a little bit of silly would disarm that feeling.

Similarly, that's why the error version of the mascot looks more surprised if anything. After all, only legitimate users will ever see that. (bots don't have eyes, or at least don't particularly care)

As for the design specifically, making it more anubis-like would probably have been a bit TOO furry and significantly hurt adoption. The design prompt was to stick to a jackal girl. Then again, I kinda wished in retrospect I had made the ears much, much longer.

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

#685

Post by armada651 »

octo888 wrote: post #646
armada651 wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...)

What part of that image is sexualized?

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

#686

Post by tgv »

technion wrote: post #362
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 really should be recognised just how many people are watching Cloudflare interstitials on nearly every site these days (and I totally get why this happens) yet making a huge amount of noise about Anubis on a very small amount of sites.

That says something about the chosen picture, doesn't it? Probably that it's not well liked. It certainly isn't neutral, while the Cloudfare page is.

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

#687

Post by armada651 »

octo888 wrote: post #656
ChrisRR wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both. I don't want any random pictures of young girls popping up while I'm browsing the web, and why would adults insert pictures of young girls into their project in the first place?

[flagged]

It's sad that for a lot of people their only exposure to anime seems to be porn and thus that's all they can think of when they see something drawn in that style.

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

#688

Post by pilif »

account42 wrote: post #607
pilif wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was obviously dumb when it launched: Yes. Obviously dumb but also nearly 100% successful at the current point in time. And likely going to stay successful as the non-protected internet still provides enough information to dumb crawlers that it’s not financially worth it to even vibe-code a workaround. Or in other words: Anubis may be dumb, but the average crawler that completely exhausting some sites resources…

> Yes. Obviously dumb but also nearly 100% successful at the current point in time. Only if you don't care about negatively affecting real users.

I understand this as an argument that it’s better to be down for everyone than have a minority of users switch browsers.

I’m not convinced by that makes sense.

Now ideally you would have the resources to serve all users and all the AI bots without performance degradation, but for some projects that’s not feasible.

In the end it’s all a compromise.

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

#689

Post by wraptile »

I'm a scraper developer and Anubis would have worked 10 - 20 years ago, but now all broad scrapers run on a real headless browser with full cookie support and costs relatively nothing in compute. I'd be surprised if LLM bots would use anything else given the fact that they have all of this compute and engineers already available.

That being said, one point is very correct here - by far the best effort to resist broad crawlers is a _custom_ anti-bot that could be as simple as "click your mouse 3 times" because handling something custom is very difficult in broad scale. It took the author just few minutes to solve this but for someone like Perplexity it would take hours of engineering and maintenance to implement a solution for each custom implementation which is likely just not worth it.

You can actually see this in real life if you google web scraping services and which targets they claim to bypass - all of them bypass generic anti-bots like Cloudflare, Akamai etc. but struggle with custom and rare stuff like Chinese websites or small forums because scraping market is a market like any other and high value problems are solved first. So becoming a low value problem is a very easy way to avoid confrontation.

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

#690

Post by Almondsetat »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #683
Almondsetat wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

By that logic you could just make your website in general load slower to make scraping harder.

No, because in this case there are cookies involved. If the scraper accepts cookies then it's trivial to detect it and block it. If it doesn't, it will have to solve the challenge every single time.
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