> PoW increases the cost for the bots which is great. Trivial to implement, sure, but that added cost will add up quickly.
No, the article estimates it would cost less than a single penny to scrape all pages of 1,000,000 distinct Anubis-guarded websites for an entire month.
but... how? when the author ran the numbers, the rough estimate is solving the challenges at a rate of 10000/5 min, on a single instance of the free tier of google compute. that is an insignificant load at an even more insignificant cost.
Maybe. But what’s happening is ”copyright for thee not for me”, not a universal relaxation of copyright. This loophole exploitation by behemoths doesn’t advance any ideological goals, it only inflames the situation because now you have an adversarial topology. You can see this clearly in practice – more and more resources are going into defense and protection of data than ever before. Fingerprinting, captchas, paywalls, login walls, etc etc.
Don’t forget signed attestations from “user probably has skin in the game” cloud providers like iCloud (already live in Safari and accepted by Cloudflare, iirc?) — not because they identify you but because abusive behavior will trigger attestation provider rate limiting and termination of services (which, in Apple’s case, includes potentially a console kill for the associated hardware). It’s not very popular to discuss at HN but I bet Anubis could add support for it regardless :)
> Fuck AI scrapers, and fuck all this copyright infringement at scale.
Yes, fuck them. Problem is Anubis here is not doing the job. As the article already explains, currently Anubis is not adding a single cent to the AI scrappers' costs. For Anubis to become effective against scrappers, it will necessarily have to become quite annoying for legitimate users.
> PoW increases the cost for the bots which is great. Trivial to implement, sure, but that added cost will add up quickly.
No, the article estimates it would cost less than a single penny to scrape all pages of 1,000,000 distinct Anubis-guarded websites for an entire month.
Once you've built the system that lets you do that, maybe. You still have to do that, though, so it's still raising the cost floor.
but... how? when the author ran the numbers, the rough estimate is solving the challenges at a rate of 10000/5 min, on a single instance of the free tier of google compute. that is an insignificant load at an even more insignificant cost.
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I thought HN was anti-copyright and anti-imaginary-property, or at least the bulk of its users were. Yet all of a sudden, "but AI!!!!1"?
a federal crime
The rest of the world doesn't care.
> I thought HN was anti-copyright
Maybe. But what’s happening is ”copyright for thee not for me”, not a universal relaxation of copyright. This loophole exploitation by behemoths doesn’t advance any ideological goals, it only inflames the situation because now you have an adversarial topology. You can see this clearly in practice – more and more resources are going into defense and protection of data than ever before. Fingerprinting, captchas, paywalls, login walls, etc etc.
Don’t forget signed attestations from “user probably has skin in the game” cloud providers like iCloud (already live in Safari and accepted by Cloudflare, iirc?) — not because they identify you but because abusive behavior will trigger attestation provider rate limiting and termination of services (which, in Apple’s case, includes potentially a console kill for the associated hardware). It’s not very popular to discuss at HN but I bet Anubis could add support for it regardless :)
https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/privacypass/about/
https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-overview/
> PoW increases the cost for the bots which is great.
But not by any meaningful amount as explained in the article. All it actually does is rely on it's obscurity while interfering with legitimate use.
> Fuck AI scrapers, and fuck all this copyright infringement at scale.
Yes, fuck them. Problem is Anubis here is not doing the job. As the article already explains, currently Anubis is not adding a single cent to the AI scrappers' costs. For Anubis to become effective against scrappers, it will necessarily have to become quite annoying for legitimate users.
Best response to AI scrapers is to poison their models.
how well is modern poisoning holding up?
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