I’ve seen this pop up on websites a lot lately. Usually it takes a few seconds to load the website but there have been occasions where it seemed to hang as it was stuck on that screen for minutes and I ended up closing my browser tab because the website just wouldn’t load.
Is this a (known) issue or is it intended to be like this?
anubis is basically a bitcoin miner, with the difficulty turned way down (and obviously not resulting in any coins), so it’s inherently random. if it takes minutes it does seem like something is wrong though. maybe a network error?
adding to this, some sites set the difficulty way higher then others, nerdvpn’s invidious and redlib instances take about 5 seconds and some ~20k hashes, while privacyredirect’s inatances are almost instant with less then 50 hashes each time
Open source is also the AI scraper bots AND the internet itself, it is every character in the story.
I don’t understand how/why this got so popular out of nowhere… the same solution has already existed for years in the form of haproxy-protection and a couple others… but nobody seems to care about those.
Probably because the creator had a blog post that got shared around at a point in time where this exact problem was resonating with users.
It’s not always about being first but about marketing.
It’s not always about being first but about marketing.
And one has a cute catgirl mascot, the other a website that looks like a blockchain techbro startup.
I’m even willing to bet the amount of people that set up Anubis just to get the cute splash screen isn’t insignificant.
Non paywalled link https://archive.is/VcoE1
It basically boils down to making the browser do some cpu heavy calculations before allowing access. This is no problem for a single user, but for a bot farm this would increase the amount of compute power they need 100x or more.
Exactly. It’s called proof-of-work and was originally invented to reduce spam emails but was later used by Bitcoin to control its growth speed
it wasn’t made for bitcoin originally? didn’t know that!
Thank you for the link. Good read
Everytime I see anubis I get happy because I know the website has some quality information.
My archive’s server uses Anubis and after initial configuration it’s been pain-free. Also, I’m no longer getting multiple automated emails a day about how the server’s timing out. It’s great.
We went from about 3000 unique “pinky swear I’m not a bot” visitors per (iirc) half a day to 20 such visitors. Twenty is much more in-line with expectations.
Ooh can this work with Lemmy without affecting federation?
To be honest, I need to ask my admin about that!
Yes, it would make lemmy as unsearchable as discord. Instead of unsearchable as pinterest.
That’s not true, search indexer bots should be allowed through from what I read here.
“Yes”, for any bits the user sees. The frontend UI can be behind Anubis without issues. The API, including both user and federation, cannot. We expect “bots” to use an API, so you can’t put human verification in front of it. These "bots* also include applications that aren’t aware of Anubis, or unable to pass it, like all third party Lemmy apps.
That does stop almost all generic AI scraping, though it does not prevent targeted abuse.
Yes.
Source: I use it on my instance and federation works fine
Thanks. Anything special configuring it?
I keep my server config in a public git repo, but I don’t think you have to do anything really special to make it work with lemmy. Since I use Traefik I followed the guide for setting up Anubis with Traefik.
I don’t expect to run into issues as Anubis specifically looks for user-agent strings that appear like human users (i.e. they contain the word “Mozilla” as most graphical web browsers do) any request clearly coming from a bot that identifies itself is left alone, and lemmy identifies itself as “Lemmy/{version} +{hostname}” in requests.
Yeah, it’s already deployed on slrpnk.net. I see it momentarily every time I load the site.
As long as its not configured improperly. When forgejo devs added it it broke downloading images with Kubernetes for a moment. Basically would need to make sure user agent header for federation is allowed.
This is fantastic and I appreciate that it scales well on the server side.
Ai scraping is a scourge and I would love to know the collective amount of power wasted due to the necessity of countermeasures like this and add this to the total wasted by ai.
All this could be avoided by making submit photo id to login into a account.
That’s awful, it means I would get my photo id stolen hundreds of times per day, or there’s also thisfacedoesntexists… and won’t work. For many reasons. Not all websites require an account. And even those that do, when they ask for “personal verification” (like dating apps) have a hard time to implement just that. Most “serious” cases use human review of the photo and a video that has your face and you move in and out of an oval shape…
<Stupidquestion>
What advantage does this software provide over simply banning bots via robots.txt?
</Stupidquestion>
TL;DR: You should have both due to the explicit breaking of the robots.txt contract by AI companies.
AI generally doesn’t obey robots.txt. That file is just notifying scrapers what they shouldn’t scrape, but relies on good faith of the scrapers. Many AI companies have explicitly chosen not no to comply with robots.txt, thus breaking the contract, so this is a system that causes those scrapers that are not willing to comply to get stuck in a black hole of junk and waste their time. This is a countermeasure, but not a solution. It’s just way less complex than other options that just block these connections, but then make you get pounded with retries. This way the scraper bot gets stuck for a while and doesn’t waste as many of your resources blocking them over and over again.
Robots.txt expects that the client is respecting the rules, for instance, marking that they are a scraper.
AI scrapers don’t respect this trust, and thus robots.txt is meaningless.
Well, now that y’all put it that way, I think it was pretty naive from me to think that these companies, whose business model is basically theft, would honour a lousy robots.txt file…
The difference is:
- robots.txt is a promise without a door
- Anubis is a physical closed door, that opens up after some time
the scrapers ignore robots.txt. It doesn’t really ban them - it just asks them not to access things, but they are programmed by assholes.
The problem is Ai doesn’t follow robots.txt,so Cloudflare are Anubis developed a solution.
I mean, you could have read the article before asking, it’s literally in there…
Just recently there was a guy on the NANOG List ranting about Anubis being the wrong approach and people should just cache properly then their servers would handle thousands of users and the bots wouldn’t matter. Anyone who puts git online has no-one to blame but themselves, e-commerce should just be made cacheable etc. Seemed a bit idealistic, a bit detached from the current reality.
Someone making an argument like that clearly does not understand the situation. Just 4 years ago, a robots.txt was enough to keep most bots away, and hosting personal git on the web required very little resources. With AI companies actively profiting off stealing everything, a robots.txt doesn’t mean anything. Now, even a relatively small git web host takes an insane amount of resources. I’d know - I host a Forgejo instance. Caching doesn’t matter, because diffs berween two random commits are likely unique. Ratelimiting doesn’t matter, they will use different IP (ranges) and user agents. It would also heavily impact actual users “because the site is busy”.
A proof-of-work solution like Anubis is the best we have currently. The least possible impact to end users, while keeping most (if not all) AI scrapers off the site.
This would not be a problem if one bot scraped once, and the result was then mirrored to all on Big Tech’s dime (cloudflare, tailscale) but since they are all competing now, they think their edge is going to be their own more better scraper setup and they won’t share.
Maybe there should just be a web to torrent bridge sovtge data is pushed out once by the server and tge swarm does the heavy lifting as a cache.
No, it’d still be a problem; every diff between commits is expensive to render to web, even if “only one company” is scraping it, “only one time”. Many of these applications are designed for humans, not scrapers.
I had seen that prompt, but never searched about it. I found it a little annoying, mostly because I didn’t know what it was for, but now I won’t mind. I hope more solutions are developed :D
it wont protect more then one subdomain i think
deleted by creator
I’d like to use Anubis but the strange hentai character as a mascot is not too professional
I actually really like the developer’s rationale for why they use an anime character as the mascot.
The whole blog post is worth reading, but the TL;DR is this:
Of course, nothing is stopping you from forking the software to replace the art assets. Instead of doing that, I would rather you support the project and purchase a license for the commercial variant of Anubis named BotStopper. Doing this will make sure that the project is sustainable and that I don’t burn myself out to a crisp in the process of keeping small internet websites open to the public.
At some level, I use the presence of the Anubis mascot as a “shopping cart test”. If you either pay me for the unbranded version or leave the character intact, I’m going to take any bug reports more seriously. It’s a positive sign that you are willing to invest in the project’s success and help make sure that people developing vital infrastructure are not neglected.
This is a great compromise honestly. More OSS devs need to be paid for their work and if an anime character helps do that, I’m all for it.
Honestly, good. Getting sick of the “professional” world being so goddamn stiff and boring. Push back against sanitized corporate aesthetics.
hentai character
anime != hentai
I smile whenever I encounter the Anubis character in the wild. She’s holding up the free software internet on her shoulders after all.
hentai?
Anime whatever. God I sound like a boomer.
Lol and yet you knew the term hentai but not anime?
I was a teenager once haha
Oh no why can’t the web be even more boring and professional
It’s just not my style ok is all I’m saying and it’s nothing I’d be able to get past all my superiors as a recommendation of software to use.
then have them pay for it.
Support, pay, and get it :)
It’s just image files, you can remove them or replace the images with something more corporate. The author does state they’d prefer you didn’t change the pictures, but the license doesn’t require adhering to their personal request. I know at least 2 sites I’ve visited previously had Anubis running with a generic checkmark or X that replaced the mascot
i’m sure you could replace it if you really wanted to
BRB gonna add a kill the corpo to the kill the boer
