Comment on Anubis is awesome and I want to talk aout it
sudo@programming.dev 4 hours agoAnd how do you actually check for working JS in a way that can’t be easily spoofed? Hint: PoW is a good way to do that.
Accessing the browsers API in any way is way harder to spoof than some hashing. I already suggested checking if the browser has graphics acceleration. That would filter out the vast majority of headless browsers too. PoW is just math and is easy to spoof without running any JavaScript. You can even do it faster than real JavaScript users something like Rust or C.
Meta refresh is a downgrade in usability for everyone but a tiny minority that has disabled JS.
What are you talking about? It just refreshes the page without doing any of the extra computation that PoW does. What extra burden does it put on users?
poVoq@slrpnk.net 4 hours ago
If you check for GPU (not generally a bad idea) you will have the same people that currently complain about JS, complain about this breaking with their anti-fingerprinting browser addons.
But no, you can’t spoof PoW obviously, that’s the entire point of it. If you do the calculation in Javascript or not doesn’t really matter for it to work.
In the current shape Anubis has zero impact on usability for 99% of the site visitors, not so with meta refresh.
sudo@programming.dev 2 hours ago
You will have people complain about their anti-fingerprinting being blocked with every bot-managment solution. Your ability to navigate the internet anonymously is directly correlated with a bots ability to scrape. That has never been my complaint about Anubis.
My complaint is that the calculations Anubis forces you to do are absolutely negligible burden for a bot to solve. The hardest part is just having a JavaScript interpreter available. Making the author of the scraper write custom code to deal with your website is the most effective way to prevent bots.
Think about how much computing power AI data centers have. Do you think they give a shit about hashing some values for Anubis? No. They burn more compute power than a thousand Anubis challenges generating a single llm answer. PoW is a backwards solution.
Please Think. Captchas worked because they’re supposed to be hard for a computer to solve but are easy for a human. PoW is the opposite.
Again, I ask you: What extra burden does meta-refresh impose on users? How does setting a cookie and immediately refreshing the page burden the user more than making them wait longer while draining their battery before doing the exact same thing? Its strictly less intrusive.
natecox@programming.dev 2 hours ago
Heads up, you’re really invested in arguing with someone who does not appear to be arguing in good faith. Just block them and move on, you will be a happier person for it.
sudo@programming.dev 1 hour ago
🤙
poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 hours ago
No one is disputing that in theory (!) Anubis offers very little protection against an adversary that specifically tries to circumvent it, but we are dealing with an elephant in the porcelain shop kind of situation. The AI companies simply don’t care if they kill off small independently hosted web-applications with their scraping and Anubis is the mouse that is currently sufficient to make them back off.
And no, forced site reloads are extremely disruptive for web-applications and often force a lot of extra load for re-authentication etc. It is not as easy as you make it sound.
sudo@programming.dev 1 hour ago
Anubis forces the site to reload when doing the normal PoW challenge! Meta Refresh is a sufficient mouse to block 99% of all bot traffic without being any more burdensome than PoW.
You’ve failed to demonstrate why meta-refresh is more burdensome than PoW and have pivoted to arguing the point I was making from the start as though it was your own. I’m not arguing with you any further. I’m satisfied that I’ve convinced any readers of our discussion.