It's still very unclear to me how Anubis is supposed to work in the long term or even the medium term. The assumption is that scrappers, a.k.a. AI companies, a.k.a. those who hog all the RAM, are short of memory...?
It's still very unclear to me how Anubis is supposed to work in the long term or even the medium term. The assumption is that scrappers, a.k.a. AI companies, a.k.a. those who hog all the RAM, are short of memory...?
The assumption is that requiring 1 second of compute before allowing a page load will have more impact on the people requesting 1000 pages/sec than it will on consumers requesting 1 page every minute.
Personally I don’t understand where this confusion comes from - it’s a simple economic tactic. Yes the large scale scrapers won’t run out of compute but putting anubis in front of a website demonstrably reduces the amount of crawling and that is the entire goal.
> requiring 1 second of compute before allowing a page load
After 1 solve, you get a cookie and can load tons of pages with it. Scrapers and user agents alike will need to spend the compute only once to get a valid session for themselves
Seems to be working so far though. Fwiw, lots of silly things stop bots until someone puts their mind (or tokens) to bypassing it, and then the blocking mechanism has to adapt. We'll see how it plays out, for now it's a lot better than begging big brother (cloudflare, google, or amazon captcha) for access, so I'm quite appreciative of what Techaro is doing
The issue is that scrapers are rotating their IP and essentially performing a DDoS attack. Anubis is part of a defense-in-depth solution. If scrapers reuse a cookie, traditional anti-abuse mechanisms will work.
>If scrapers reuse a cookie, traditional anti-abuse mechanisms will work.
Scrapers can't change their strategy? It's not hard to think of mitigations: keep on using a session until you're banned, and failing that rotate your IP. Nowadays you don't even need to think. You can probably tell a LLM "write me a scraper that has adaptive anti-anti-bot mechanism".
> Scrapers can't change their strategy?
Yes, but you normally don't try to fight all strategies up front, you add stuff on a need-to basis. Currently, lots of people are in the stage of "need to get this thing using bunch of IPs to stop hammering my servers", apparently Anubis helps them with that. If that stops working, other tactics are tried, and so it goes on for the life of your service. Hasn't stopped yet, doesn't seem to be stopped soon either.
That argument also works against anubis. Why bother forcing clients to solve a PoW challenge, when you're fighting a bunch of unsophisticated attackers that will be deterred by a javascript challenge that requires them to solve `result = x + y`?
This is why there's the meta refresh challenge as an option: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/configuration/challeng...
Turns out that in practice there's some bots that implement support for this but not JavaScript.
Point is, you get problems because of something like this, you try either approach. And when that stops working (because eventually it will), you add something else. Some work better against some actors, but also feels like it never ends, so slowly you add more things. I don't think Anubis is uniquely able to stop that particular type of annoyance, it's just one of the tools you can see if it helps. If you want to try something else before, makes a lot of sense to do so.
You're not fighting unsophisticated attackers. 50% of them are, maybe. The rest? They're actively hostile, detecting blocking attempts, moving on to botnets, DDoSing you and trying everything they can to bypass you.
People have been sent to jail for participating in LOIC attacks which were less destructive that what these bots do on the daily.
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Not only is this not true, you are misgendering Xe. They use they/them pronouns.
Plenty of these abusive scrapers are utilizing retail residential proxies, which will be applying forced rotations to avoid "burning" their compromised and or otherwise surreptitiously utilized IP address.
https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/creepy-crawlies reports anubis effectiveness falling off
I would disagree with the Anubis effectiveness falling off, but the llm bros are throwing life itself into training to defeat any “perceived” challenge.
If you change your IP address, it invalidates the cookie. If you don't change your IP address, you can be blocked by IP address.
It’s not seconds though, it’s in the order of tens of milliseconds of work, it’s faster to complete the challenge than most http requests will take.
last difficulty 5 nonce 645376 in 9 ms (101.6MH/s, avx512-x16)
This takes many minutes to solve on a cellphone, 9 milliseconds on a cheap VPS. It’s not stopping anyone.
Yep, on my aging phone it takes quite w noticable amount of time to go through. But on my more recent laptop wnd workstations, it's a quick flash of a manga lolita.
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>It’s not stopping anyone.
You could just spend 30 seconds googling instead of confidently asserting nonsense. There are plenty of people demonstrating that Anubis reduces bot traffic.
That’s because its weird and mostly irrelevant, it’s nothing to do with the proof of work being any sort of economic impediment. It takes Claude a few minutes to write a near instant solver, that’s the maximum proof of work cost this adds.
This strain of nihilism about anti-bot efforts baffles me. Cloudflare built a gigantic business on stopping DDoS attacks. There will never be good faith self-restraint by AI bros, there is too much money at stake and no regulation, doing nothing means your only alternative is disconnect from the Internet. Anubis introduces enough friction that some percentage of the lunacy is throttled and possibly give your server a fighting chance.
>There are plenty of people demonstrating that Anubis reduces bot traffic.
"Anubis reduces bot traffic" and "[the proof of work] is not stopping anyone" isn't contradictory, especially if anubis isn't being benchmarked against non-POW alternatives like IP/ASN bans, or tls fingerprinting.
"it's not stopping anyone" and "it is stopping some people" are mutually exclusive statements.
You're selectively quoting the comment. It's clearly talking about the PoW aspect not being a serious impediment.
Who cares if its PoW or something else? Does it matter in any meaningful way?
>The assumption is that requiring 1 second of compute before allowing a page load will have more impact on the people requesting 1000 pages/sec than it will on consumers requesting 1 page every minute.
Which doesn't hold. A 1s delay, despite being inperceptible is still a cost to human users. After all, 3600 x 1s delay adds up to an hour. Worse yet, the typical human visitor will always have to solve a challenge, because chances are it's the first time they're visiting your blog or whatever. Someone scraping reuse a valid session for at least a few more pages.
There's also the problem of time. It might be tempting to think the cost of a challenge is 1M cpu cycles or whatever, but the cost is better modeled as two parts, a time cost (for the human) and a cpu cost (for the computer). A scraper might have to pay the cpu cost, but not the time cost, because they can have their scraper solve challenges in their sleep. Unless the user is utterly destitute, their time is worth far more than whatever the compute cost is.
The assumption is that there will always be some population distribution in terms of effort expended as well as in terms of problems caused. At present it's the lowest effort actors that are causing the highest number of problems. So an 80% (or even just a 20%) solution largely solves the practical problem faced by site operators.
If against all odds it turns out that skiddies (or agents or AI billionaires or what have you) are willing to burn inordinate amounts of RAM and CPU just to scrape autogenerated cgit pages that are of approximately zero value to them to begin with then I guess we'll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.
Okay but it's like no RAM at all. Thats the problem: you've got stupid bots causing a bunch of issues - these can be stopped.
And then regular users: who now can't really browse your site.
And then smart bots - anyone with even a moderate amount of funding in the AI space, who aren't even slightly slowed down.
The solution basically makes the favored customer well funded AI scrapers, not users.
Regular users store the cookie and do the challenge once. Bots do it over and over again throwing out the cookies so they're not rate-limited.
Extreme configurations with high difficulty do make for a frustrating experience on very old devices, but in practice it rarely gets in the way.
Only the tail end of what one could consider normal users (those running custom browsers or having JS disabled or nonfunctional) run into issues here, but they'll have these issues with any other bot-blocking mechanism that still offers some protection these days.
Apple's "ask your vendor for tokens to exchange for access" web standard gets around this, assuming those bespoke and Javascript-less browsers implement PATs, but that standard seems to be completely dead in the water outside of Safari.
> And then regular users: who now can't really browse your site.
That's entirely up to how the site operator configures the PoW challenge.
> anyone with even a moderate amount of funding in the AI space, who aren't even slightly slowed down
Do you have any evidence that it is the large well funded AI companies DoSing sites by (for example) scraping absurd numbers of permutations of cgit url parameters?
Even if it is (which I doubt), if all this accomplishes is getting them to spend 10 minutes optimizing their bots to not do that it will be a major win.
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