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
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”)…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 wish AI scrapes didn’t make the Internet unusable to the point of them using Cloudflare MITM or Anubis
My country’s public TV stopped offering subtitle downloads for shows that can’t be streamed online
(The transcript was always easily available with second-accurate timing by clicking the ㏄ button next to any subtitled program, whether or not it was available for streaming (usually indefinitely for old ČT production, 14 days for old movies and recent ČT production, never for new movies or shows). One person used this transcript of a documentary on nutria breeding verbatim (no edits except stage instructions and punctuation) to create a somewhat dadaist sci-fi musical featuring intellligent alien beings that happen to be called Nutria. And the frame-accurate, albeit Teletext-restricted (Czech+Slovak+German uppercase/lowercase alphabet only, 38x2, 1 subtitle/s, 7 colors) subtitles were also available by applying a simple Regex to the show page’s URL. Now a unique subtitle URL is generated only when the server and JavaScript + WideVine player complete a handshake.)
Honestly better than running into cloudfail every 5mins
A word of advice: download Arch wiki for offline use.
You can use Kiwix to have a full graphical wiki, or use things like arch-wiki-docs.
Why not use archive.org or similar to read the page?
For some reason that doesn’t work for me when I am offline.
Difficulty 6 is a little high. The default is 4.
Also this instance; can’t browse it on Desktop with a Librewolf-alike policies.json. Can the sensibility be adjusted server-side? No problems on Archwiki & co.
I wish it were doing protein folding work or something less wasteful.
I wonder if that could be a thing
FoldCoin
put crypto nonsense to work and maybe help fund research
My concern like everything open-source is a single person deciding to profit off of it.
That exists already, actually: GridCoin
Banano is also one. But this one is more of a memecoin.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve had websites like Nix Hydra randomly give me a webpage full of gibberish which is also annoying and a lot moreso than the Anibus ones because you can’t get past it, I thought they got hacked at first also
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…
Instructions unclear: tipped my servers, now all offline?
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.
Search engines doing it is good because now you are indexed and will show up in searched and they won’t do it as often as AIs.
AIs will take your stuff, DDOS you in the meantime and do it periodically - by different people too, they don’t give back anything either
Unfortunately yeah, people with exceptionally shit computers get caught in the cross-fire of these things
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 accesses.
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’ve had Anubis get stuck for me before. Usually clears up if you refresh the page
Maybe that’s part of the challenge, lol.
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.
Wait, I’m not mining crypto trash for strangers whenever I see that annoying fox girl, am I?
crypto* as in cryptography, not *currency
Proof-of-work in approach, not towards the same ends. The goal is to prevent scraping, not monetization.
Vain*
Vein*
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!
Same process, different product.
