Live data from Hacker News

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

lock.cmpxchg8b.com

841–850 of 968 posts

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

#841
post #394
post #56

I wonder if the best solution is still just to create link mazes with garbage text like this: https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/ It won't stop the crawlers immediately, but it might lead to an overhyped and underwhelming LLM release from a big name company, and force them to reassess their crawling strategy going forward?

That won't work, because garbage data is filtered after the full dataset is collected anyway. Every LLM trainer these days knows that curation is key.

If the "garbage data" is AI generated, it'll be hard or impossible to filter.

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

#842
post #530
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…

CloudFlare is dystopic. It centralizes even the part of the Internet that hadn't been centralized before. It is a perfect Trojan horse to bypass all encryption. And it chooses who accesses (a considerable chunk of) the Internet and who doesn't. Anubis looks much better than this.

It's literally insane. After Snowden, how the fuck did we ended up with a single US company terminating almost every TLS connection?

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

#843
post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are just feigning a lack of understanding to be dismissive of Anubis. I actually find the featured article very interesting. It doesn't feel dismissive of Anubis, but rather it questions whether this particular solution makes sense or not in a constructive way.

I agree - the article is interesting and not dismissive. I was talking more about some of the people here ;)

I still don't understand what Anubis solves if it can be bypassed too easily: If you use User-agent switcher (i emulate wget) as firefox addon on kernel.org or ffmpeg.org you save the entire check time and straight up skip Anubis. Apparently they use a whitelist for user-agents due to allowing legitimate wget usage on these domains. However if I (an honest human can) the scrapers and grifters can too.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/

If anyone wants to try themselves. This is by no means against Anubis, but raising the question: Can you even protect a domain if you force yourself to whitelist (for a full bypass) easy to guess UAs?

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

#844
post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nothing says, "Change out the logo for something that doesn't make my clients tingle in an uncomfortable way" like the MIT license.

I wonder why the anime girl is received so badly. Is it because it's seen as childish? Is it bad because it confuses people (i.e. don't do this because other don't do this)?

Thinking about it logically, putting some "serious" banner there would just make everything a bit more grey and boring and would make no functional difference. So why is it disliked so much?

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

#845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criminal convictions in the US require a standard of proof that is "beyond a reasonable doubt" and I suspect cases like this would not pass the required mens rea test, as, in their minds at least (and probably a judge's), there was no ill intent to cause a denial of service... and trying to argue otherwise based on any technical reasoning (e.g. "most servers cannot handle this load and they somehow knew it") is IMO u…

There's an angle where criminal intent doesn't matter when it comes to negligence and damages. They have to had known that their scrapers would cause denial of service, unauthorized access, increased costs for operators, etc.

> criminal intent doesn't matter when it comes to negligence and damages

Are you a criminal defense attorney or prosecutor?

> They have to had known

IMO good luck convincing a judge of that... especially "beyond a reasonable doubt" as would be required for criminal negligence. They could argue lots of other scrapers operate just fine without causing problems, and that they tested theirs on other sites without issue.

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

#846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, there are enough real pedophiles in the world, like POTUS for instance. No need to go after made up ones.

[flagged]

What do you mean by this shallow dismissal? That Trump isn't a pedophile or that discussing this fact is forbidden?

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

#847

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…

You don't even need to go there. If the damn thing didn't work the site admin wouldn't have added it and kept it.

Sure the program itself is jank in multiple ways but it solves the problem well enough.

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

#848
post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? What false positives does Anubis produce? The article doesn't say and I constantly get the most difficult Google captchas, cloudflare block pages saying "having trouble?" (which is a link to submit a ticket that seems to land in /dev/null), IP blocks because user agent spoofing, errors "unsupported browser" when I don't do user agent spoofing... the only anti-bot thing that reliably works on all my clients is An…

I've had Anubis repeatedly fail to authorize me to access numerous open source projects, including the mesa3d gitlab, with a message looking something like "you failed". As a legitimate open source developer and contributor to buildroot, I've had no recourse besides trying other browsers, networks, and machines, and it's triggered on several combinations.

It sounds[1] like this was an issue with assumptions regarding header stability. Hopefully as people update their installations things will improve for us end users.

[1]: https://anubis.techaro.lol/blog/release/v1.20.0/#chrome-wont...

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

#849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had Anubis repeatedly fail to authorize me to access numerous open source projects, including the mesa3d gitlab, with a message looking something like "you failed". As a legitimate open source developer and contributor to buildroot, I've had no recourse besides trying other browsers, networks, and machines, and it's triggered on several combinations.

It sounds[1] like this was an issue with assumptions regarding header stability. Hopefully as people update their installations things will improve for us end users. [1]: https://anubis.techaro.lol/blog/release/v1.20.0/#chrome-wont...

Thank goodness. It was feeling quite dystopian being caught in a bot dragnet that blocked me from resources that are relevant and vital to my work.

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

#850
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have been seeing our clients' sites being absolutely *hammered* by AI bots trying to blend in. Some of the bots use invalid user agents - they _look_ valid on the surface, but under the slightest scrutiny, it becomes obvious they're not real browsers. Personally I have no issues with AI bots, that properly identify themselves, from scraping content as if the site operator doesn't want it to happen they can easily…

> We have been seeing our clients' sites being absolutely hammered by AI bots trying to blend in. Some of the bots use invalid user agents - they _look_ valid on the surface, but under the slightest scrutiny, it becomes obvious they're not real browsers. Yep. I noticed this too. > That said they could even run headless versions of the browser engines... Yes, exactly. To my knowledge that's what's going on with the la…

I haven't seen much if anything getting past our pretty simple proof-of-work challenge but I imagine it's only a matter of time.

Thankfully, so far, it's still been pretty easy to block them by their user agents as well.

Post reply on HN