Anubis rarely ever annoys me (I still prefer it over cloudflare’s Mitm) but this specific visit feels almost vindictive. It used half my CPU cores at full blast for three straight minutes.
It seems to be effective since I can’t really “bypass” it with extensions, so AI crawlers probably can’t either, but damn there really should be an option to complete a manual captcha or email the administrators to complain.
As I’m typing this the challenge is still running xD
I wonder if this even is effective. If a bot can solve anubis challenges, why can’t it solve all difficulties?
I’m a server asking with it.
I went from thousands of requests per minute down to 5. Five. Database was pegged constantly at 100% serving requests down to ~50% now. Huge difference.
The point is to make scraping too expensive to be profitable. Even the easy level 4 anubis challenge multiplied by a few million pages becomes very expensive.
It’s not about stopping the bots, it’s about slowing them down
But once the challenge is completed, they have the token and can scrape until it’s expired right? So if it’s just taking them a bit more time to get the auth token, what is it solving?
Example: the token lasts for a week and it takes 30 seconds to get the token.
I would assume the token is only good for a few page access.
E.g. 500 would mean that a person would see this extremely rarely, and still block a bot from crashing the site.
No it actually lasts for a long time. We have it on my Lemmy instance for https://old.lemmy.today/ and it’s generated once and lasts for many days, probably a week. I guess it’s configurable but if you generate it too often, your visitors will also be annoyed.
It will still slow them down and cobsume a ton of processing power- for data centers, it gets less profitable for them to scrap, it also completly stop some shitty bots
I wish it were doing protein folding work or something less wasteful.
I wonder if that could be a thing
FoldCoin
Banano is also one. But this one is more of a memecoin.
My concern like everything open-source is a single person deciding to profit off of it.
That exists already, actually: GridCoin
Would you trust the output of an A.I. swarm?
The idea is to pick some task that is very difficult to calculate, but easy to verify. E.g., confirming a crossword is correct is much faster than filling one in.
Protein folding is one such example, and it’s useful to boot. The results can be used in medical research, for example.
Donating compute via Folding@Home was quite popular for a while for this exact reason.
Folding@Home being built into the PS3 might have been one of the last tech-utopian hurrahs I can think of experiencing. As opposed to everything tech now feeling too dystopian for one of any number of reasons
I don’t know how protein folding works, but if it’s easy to check it’s correct, then doesn’t that violate that mathematical principle where verifying an answer is as difficult as computing the answer in the first place? I forget the name of it.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, volunteers at home are already self-selecting to be mostly honest and donating correct answers for a good cause. Their output trustworthiness is moderate-high. Spammers, bots, A.I. swarms, ddos networks, random users, etc… not so much. You can’t really trust their output at all, you have to verify it very carefully and treat it as malicious or just incorrect junk by default.
verifying an answer is as difficult as computing the answer in the first place
What the distributed computing stuff does is check many many potential answers. You’re only interested in the right answers, and they’re easy to verify. If there’s a concern about junk answers, the answers could probably be compared across multiple clients to verify.
You’re thinking, as someone else said, of P = NP. This is technically an unsolved problem. We don’t know if P = NP is true, there is no proof that guarantees it. However, it’s looking pretty unlikely.
This problem would have huge consequences for a wide range of fields, and it would break most cryptography and encryption algorithms we have (assuming it is proven true).
Anyway, this is what Anubis is already doing. That’s why OP complained about being stuck for 3 minutes with the CPU at full blast. Anubis gave the PC some problem that was difficult to compute. The problem itself was not important, it’s just to keep the computer busy for a bit. (The idea is that this significantly slows down spam bots and other automated access, I believe).
Of course Anubis has to verify the answer is correct, and that the client didn’t just send garbage. So the problem Anubis already uses is one that is easier to verify than to compute.
Btw, it is possible to verify solutions where checking is as expensive as solving. You provide each client with at least 2 problems. One where you already know the answer, and one where you don’t. You have the client solve both. If the known one is good, you let them through, and add the unknown one to the known set. You can even verify it by sending it to two other clients, see if they all get the same answer. But I believe that this solution wouldn’t be required, because protein folding ‘violates’ the P=NP problem.
What you’re referring to is called the P vs NP problem, and you’ve got it backwards. The problem is basically “does having an easily verified answer mean that there is also an easy to FIND the answer” and all the evidence we have so far points to no, but we aren’t sure.
This is the entire concept behind cryptology - it’s easy to verify you have the correct key, because if you have the correct key you can decode the message and it isn’t gibberish. It is not, however, easy to figure out what the key is from the encrypted text.
that mathematical principle where verifying an answer is as difficult as computing the answer in the first place
You’re thinking of the P vs NP problem, but you got the details wrong. There are known cases where the answer is easy to verify.
The problem being the challenge needs to be unique and issued by the server on demand, otherwise a computer can have a bunch of pre-processed challenge answers ready to fire out a huge burst of requests. (Or re-use the solutions on other websites)
Unfortunately yeah, people with exceptionally shit computers get caught in the cross-fire of these things
Wait, I’m not mining crypto trash for strangers whenever I see that annoying fox girl, am I?
Proof-of-work in vein, not towards the same ends. The goal is to prevent scraping, not monetization.
Vain*
Reworded it instead, but thanks for the correction.
You’re welcome! I wasn’t sure if it was a typo, autocorrect, or language misunderstanding, but the correction was in good faith. I deeply appreciate a good faith reply!
Vein*
Same process, different product.
crypto* as in cryptography, not *currency
You could try hitting up the Internet archive for a quick workaround.
I think you can also download a copy of the entire arch wiki as a zim file too
You are supposed to have a local copy:
Ironically got hit with Anubis on that page
https://lb.download.kiwix.org/zim/other/archlinux_en_all_maxi_2026-07.zim.torrent
Here is a direct link
lang=eng
First item is in Japanese
Improperly tagged thing appear in large libraries all of the time (humans make mistakes)
Wild that I thought a difficulty of 4 was reasonable when I set up Anubis on my reverse proxy.
yeah this shit takes so much longer on old hardware and nobody gives a fuck
The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable
So uh anyone anyone gonna tell them the idea was wrong? Three minutes is not ignorable.
The difficulty is typically dynamic based on current request load. At this difficulty typically means their server is getting hammered really hard, better this than the server just respond with a bad gateway error.
It would be better to serve a static page saying “the server is getting hammered really hard”, and, if possible, context about the duration of the current event and historical frequency.
Disagree, that just stops me from using it completely instead of just having to wait a bit
Waiting 3 minutes stops me from using a site. If it’s something I really need I’ll check back in an hour or two, when hopefully it’s not getting hammered; the same for both approaches.
Less sites are doing that to intentionally avoid tipping off the AIs about thresholds and trigger behaviours. The two main solutions are browser crypto challenges like this, or silently diverting flagged connections to a tar-pit of fake pages. The former is easier to implement but the latter actively sabotages the scraped data.
Difficulty 6 is a little high. The default is 4.
Think of it like tipping culture. Get mad at AI industry scrapers that make anubis necessary. Sam Altman is the reason you are enduring this. Take a lighter and…
I suspect this is more about all the individual searches than mass scraping. We’ve had google et al scraping the entire web for a long time and nobody gave a fuck. AI makes it easy to launch a ton of web searches without putting much thought into it.
Instructions unclear: tipped my servers, now all offline?
Good to see it’s not just me. I kept receiving heat (pun intended) whenever I criticized these “Proof-of-work anti-bot solutions”, now I finally know I’m not alone.
Like an unskippable Youtube ad, we’re supposed to sit three minutes while these “solutions” dangerously burn our CPU regardless of whether it’s an old CPU, and without asking our consent beforehand (!!!). At least Youtube ads don’t (usually) burn the CPU the same way.
And, no, it’s nowhere close to being infuriating to the supposedly intended targets of Anubis. OpenAI and the alike are likely laughing of Xe Iaso while they all burn more coal and increase the hyperscale data centers, with Anubis being just a pesky, insignificant pebble inside businessmen shoes. Meanwhile, we, the human users caught in this crossfire, including me with my poor decade-old Acer ES1-572 laptop, we can’t afford a new machine should Anubis, Cloudflare and other similar “anti-bot solutions” end up “weighting” our CPU too much it finally makes its way to the underworld with no one being legally liable for the physical damages caused by such algorithms.
If only Anubis, supposedly “different” from Cloudflare’s corporate nature, had a “Proceed or Leave” button or checkbox to start the “weighting your heart” thing, I wouldn’t be complaining or actively boycotting websites using “PoW anti-bot solutions” (I made myself a Firemonkey userscript to speedrun a
window.close()for pages whose title is one of the “Just a moment…” or “Making sure you’re not a bot!”, because neither Xe Iaso nor Matthew Prince nor the webmasters using their “PoW anti-bot solutions” would buy me a new laptop if mine eventually died from facing heavy cryptographic computing while my CPU was already struggling with a Blender rendering process in the background). But, no, it’s no different than the corporate they swear to be fighting against (“something something one who fights with monsters should be careful lest they thereby become a monster themselves”)…!mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
the most I’m giving any site is 6 seconds on a typical visit, 10 if I’m feeling generous. if I’m not seeing shit at 10 your site is broken
I’ve actually wanted to deploy this with some absurdly difficult challenge as a troll but I don’t know what’s worth putting behind a webpage with effectively a client side loading bar lol.
Your gpg private key
For everything
Find some relevant XKCD, and drop that on a 404 page
You did say you want to troll people
Every time I watch Youtuße through Invidious and I get this crap, it gets stuck every time and goes nowhere.
Public invidious instances are more a proof of concept, its much more performant to run it yourself.
True.
Will set one up, if more need arises.
…but people keep sharing invidious links.
The last part of the url is still the same Video id from youtube. You can copy that in whichever you use.
The internet actually really needs an overhaul to how links are presented. So you can press a video link and opening in the compatible player you prefer.
Same issue exists on lemmy. A link will send you to the instance of the poster, we have special ! Links to bridge the gap but i can never remember how to use em.
Technically, the internet already has what you’re looking for. It’s just not really standardized for video media.
The beginning of the URL or the schema is already able to on most mainstream OS be controlled by a specific application.
There’s nothing really stopping anyone from making it so there’s a video:// schema, and then configuring a schema handler to handle it. on Debian it would be a single desktop file with a MimeType=x-scheme-handler/video line indicating that type of url should be opened with that desktop file. I had to configure it for vortex to get it to open mod links, I never knew how easy that was
This is every scraper for YouTube.
The only applications that I’ve ever seen reliably access YouTube are the ones that work by patching the YouTube app and then using what the app would do.
Applications like invidious or Grayjay almost always have a 15 to 30 second delay before any video.
