And it was/is for sure the lesser evil compared to what most others did: put the site behind Cloudflare.

I feel people that complain about Anubis have never had their server overheat and shut down on an almost daily basis because of AI scrapers 🤦

The problem is that the purpose of Anubis was to make crawling more computationally expensive and that crawlers are apparently increasingly prepared to accept that additional cost. One option would be to pile some required cycles on top of what's currently asked, but it's a balancing act before it starts to really be an annoyance for the meat popsicle users.

The article is very enthusiastic about explaining why it shouldn't work, but completely glosses over the fact that it has worked

This post was originally written for ycombinator "Hacker" News which is vehemently against people hacking things together for greater good, and more importantly for free.

It's more of a corporate PR release site and if you aren't known by the "community", calling out solutions they can't profit off of brings all the tech-bros to the yard for engagement.

It's working because it's not very used. It's sort of a "pirate seagull" theory. As long a few people use it it works. Because scrappers don't really count on Anubis so they don't implement systems to surpass it.

If it were to become more common it would be really easy to implement systems that would defeat the purpose.

As of right now sites are ok because scrappers just send https requests and expect a full response. If someone wants to bypass Anubis protection they would need to take into account that they will receive a cryptographic challenge and have to solve it.

The thing is that cryptographic challenges can be very optimized. They are designed to run in a very inefficient environment as it is a browser. But if someone would take the challenge and solve it in a better environment using CUDA or something like that it would take a fraction of the energy defeating the purpose of "being so costly that it's not worth scrapping".

At this point it's only a matter of time that we start seeing scrappers like that. Specially if more and more sites start using Anubis.

Cool article, thanks for linking! Not sure about that being a new development though, it's just results, but we already knew it's working. The question is, what's going to work once the scrapers adapt?

It's a perfectly valid way to explain it, though

If you try to show up with "cryptography" as an explanation, people will think of encrypting messages, not proof of work

"Cryptocurrency with the currency" really is the perfect single sentence explanation

No, it works because the scraper bots don't have it implemented yet. Of course the companies would rather not spend additional compute resources, but their pockets are deep and some already adapted and solve the challenges.

I don't get it, I thought it allows all browser with JavaScript enabled.

Yeah but at least Anubis is cute.

I'll take sucks but cute over dead internet and endless swarmings of zergling crawlers.