Making Sure You're Not a Bot: The Story Behind Anubis

You are seeing this message because the administrator of this website has set up an additional layer of protection, known as Anubis, to safeguard against the threat of AI-powered bots scraping websites. This measure can sometimes cause downtime, making resources inaccessible to users. But why is it in place, and what does it do?

Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme similar to Hashcash, a proposed solution to reduce email spam. At an individual scale, the added load may seem negligible, but when mass scrapers are involved, it becomes prohibitively expensive for them to keep up with the challenge. In essence, Anubis is a temporary workaround designed to slow down AI-powered scraping attempts while researchers focus on more sophisticated methods of identifying and fingerprinting headless browsers – such as those that manipulate font rendering.

"This is a hack whose real purpose is to buy time," acknowledges the website administrator. "We want to find better solutions, like a no-JS requirement, but that's still in development." To bypass Anubis, you'll need to enable JavaScript on your device. Unfortunately, this means disabling plugins like JShelter, which can interfere with the challenge. The good news is that modern web browsers already support the necessary JavaScript features.

The rise of AI-powered bots has disrupted the traditional social contract around website hosting. As a result, new measures are needed to protect websites from abuse. Anubis may not be the most elegant solution, but it's a temporary safeguard against the growing threat of automated scraping and exploitation.