Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lock.cmpxchg8b.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 968 posts

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

#691

Post by r0uv3n »

danieltanfh95 wrote: post #310
debugnik wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not about preventing crawling entirely, it's about finding a way to prevent crawlers from repeatedly everything way too frequently just because crawling is just very cheap. Of course it will always be worth it to crawl the Linux Kernel mailing list, but maybe with a high enough cost per crawl the crawlers will learn to be fine with only crawling it once per hour for example

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

#692

Post by tambourine_man »

ronsor wrote: post #399
tambourine_man wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, 128MB is not enough to even run Debian let alone Apache/NGINX. I’m on my phone, but it doesn’t seem like the author is using Cloudflare or another CDN. I’d like to know what they are doing.

128MB is more than enough to run Debian and serve a static site. I had no issue with doing it a decade ago and it still works fine. How much memory do you think it actually takes to accept a TLS connection and copy files from disk to a socket?

Modern Linux is much less frugal these days:

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Bullseye/Req...

* Thin clients with only 256 MiB RAM and 400 MHz are possible, though more RAM and faster processors are recommended.

* For workstations, diskless workstations and standalone systems, 1500 MHz and 1024 MiB RAM are the absolute minimum requirements. For running modern webbrowsers and LibreOffice at least 2048 MiB RAM is recommended.

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

#693

Post by timcambrant »

hdndiebf wrote: post #483
rootsudo wrote: post #59

When I instantly read it, I knew it was anubis. I hope the anime catgirls never disapear from that project :)

This anime thing is the one thing about computer culture that I just don't seem to get. I did not get it as child, when suddenly half of children cartoons became animes and I just disliked the aestheic. I didn't get it in school, when people started reading mangas . I'll probably never get it. Therefore I sincerely hope, they do go away from anubis, so I can further dwell in my ignorance.

I feel the same. It's a distinct part of nerd culture.

In the '70s, if you were into computers you were most likely also a fan of Star Trek. I remember an anecdote from the 1990s when an entire dial-up ISP was troubleshooting its modem pools because there were zero people connected and they assumed there was an outage. The outage happened to occur exactly while that week's episode of X-Files was airing in their time zone. Just as the credits rolled, all modems suddenly lit up as people connected to IRC and Usenet to chat about the episode. In ~1994 close to 100% of residential internet users also happened to follow X-Files on linear television. There was essentially a 1:1 overlap between computer nerds and sci-fi nerds.

Today's analog seems to be that almost all nerds love anime and Andy Weir books and some of us feel a bit alienated by that.

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

#694

Post by [deleted] »

CursedSilicon wrote: post #177
Arnavion wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The string I use in my extension is "anubis is crap". I took it from a different FF extension that had been posted in a /g/ thread about Anubis, which is where I got the idea from in the first place. I don't use other people's extensions if I can help it (because of the obvious risk), but I figured I'd use the same string in my own extension so as to be combined with users of that extension for the sake of user-agent…

It's a bit telling that you "don't use extensions if you can help it" but trust advice from a 4chan board

[deleted]

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

#695

Post by ramblerman »

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…

Did you read the article? OP doesn't care about bots figuring it out. It's about the compute needed to do the work.

It's quite an interesting piece, I feel like you projected something completely different onto it.

Your point is valid, but completely adjacent.

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

#696

Post by Aachen »

> an AI vendor will have a datacenter full of compute capacity. It feels like this solution has the problem backwards, effectively only limiting access to those without resources

Sure, if you ignore that humans click on one page and the problematic scrapers (not the normal search engine volume, but the level we see nowadays where misconfigured crawlers go insane on your site) are requesting many thousands to millions of times more pages per minute. So they'll need many many times the compute to continue hammering your site whereas a normal user can muster to load that one page from the search results that they were interested in

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

#697

Post by sznio »

sneak wrote: post #622
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…

The fundamental failure of this is that you can’t publish data to the web and not publish data to the web. If you make things public, the public will use it. It’s ineffective. (And furry sex-subculture propaganda pushed by its author, which is out of place in such software.)

>And furry sex-subculture propaganda pushed by its author

if your first thought when seeing a catgirl is sex, i got bad news for you

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

#698

Post by anarki8 »

account42 wrote: post #575

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.

This sounds a bit overdramatic for a less than a second waiting time per week for each device. Unless you employ an army of crawlers of course.

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

#699

Post by timcambrant »

balamatom wrote: post #633
hdndiebf wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This anime thing is the one thing about computer culture that I just don't seem to get. I did not get it as child, when suddenly half of children cartoons became animes and I just disliked the aestheic. I didn't get it in school, when people started reading mangas . I'll probably never get it. Therefore I sincerely hope, they do go away from anubis, so I can further dwell in my ignorance.

Might've caught on because the animes had plots, instead of considering viewers to have the attention spans of idiots like Western kids' shows (and, in the 21st century, software) tend to do.

I don't think it's relevant to debate if anime or other forms of media is objectively better. But as someone who has never understood anime, I view mainstream western TV series as filled with hours of cleverly written dialogue and long story arches, whereas the little anime I've watched seems to mostly be overly dramatic colorful action scenes with intense screamed dialogue and strange bodily noises. Should we maybe assume that we are both a bit ignorant of the preferences of others?

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

#700

Post by never_inline »

userbinator wrote: post #331

As I've been saying for a while now - if you want to filter for only humans, ask questions only a human can easily answer; counting the number of letters in a word seems to be a good way to filter out LLMs, for example. Yes, that can be relatively easily gotten around, just like Anubis, but with the benefit that it doesn't filter out humans and has absolutely minimal system requirements (a browser that can submit HTM…

> counting the number of letters in a word seems to be a good way to filter out LLMs

As long as this challenge remains obscure enough to be not worth implementing special handlers in the crawler, this sounds a neat idea.

But I think if everyone starts doing this particular challenge (char count), the crawlers will start instructing a cheap LLM to do appropriate tool calls and get around it. So the challenge needs to be obscure.

I wonder if anyone tried building a crawler-firewall or even nginx script which will let the site admin plug their own challenge generator in lua or something, which would then create a minimum HTML form. Maybe even vibe code it :)

Post reply on HN