Comment by technion

The annoying thing about cloudflare is that most of the time once you’re blocked: you’re blocked.

There’s literally no way for you to bypass the block if you’re affected.

Its incredibly scary, I once had a bad useragent (without knowing it) and half the internet went offline, I couldn’t even access documentation or my email providers site, and there was no contact information or debugging information to help me resolve it: just a big middle finger for half the internet.

I haven’t had issues with any sites using Anubis (yet), but I suspect there are ways to verify that you’re a human if your browser fails the automatic check at least.

I'm on an older system here, and both Cloudflare and Anubis entirely block me out of sites. Once you start blocking actual users out of your sites, it simply has gone too far. At least provide an alternative method to enter your site (e.g. via login) that's not hampered by erroneous human checks. Same for the captchas where you help train AIs by choosing out of a set of tiny/ noisy pictures. I often struggle for 5 to 10 minutes to get past that nonsense. I heard bots have less trouble.

Basically we're already past the point where the web is made for actual humans, now it's made for bots.

It's the other way around for me sometimes — I've never had issue with Anubis, I frequently get it with CF-protected sites.

(Not to mention all the sites which started putting country restrictions in on their generally useful instruction articles etc — argh)

I’m planning a trip to France right now, and it seems like half the websites in that country (for example, ratp.fr for Paris public transport info) require me to check a CloudFlare checkbox to promise that I am a human. And of those that don’t, quite a few just plain lock me out...

I get one basically every time I go to gitlab.com on Firefox.

It is easy to pass the challange, but it isn't any better than Anubis.

Even when not on VPN, if a site uses the CloudFlare interstitials, I will get it every single time - at least the "prove you're not a bot" checkbox. I get the full CAPTCHA if I'm on a VPN or I change browsers. It is certainly enough to annoy me. More than Anubis, though I do think Anubis is also annoying, mainly because of being nearly worthless.

You must be on a good network. You should run one of those "get paid to share your internet connection with AI companies" apps. Since you're on a good network you might make a lot of money. And then your network will get cloudflared, of course.

We should repeat this until every network is cloudflared and everyone hates cloudflare and cloudflare loses all its customers and goes bankrupt. The internet would be better for it.

For me both are things that mostly show up for 1-3 seconds, then get replaced by the actual website. I suspect that's the user experience of 99% of people.

If you fall in the other 1% (e.g. due to using unusual browsers or specific IP ranges), cloudflare tends to be much worse

Huh? What false positives does Anubis produce?

The article doesn't say and I constantly get the most difficult Google captchas, cloudflare block pages saying "having trouble?" (which is a link to submit a ticket that seems to land in /dev/null), IP blocks because user agent spoofing, errors "unsupported browser" when I don't do user agent spoofing... the only anti-bot thing that reliably works on all my clients is Anubis. I'm really wondering what kinds of false positives you think Anubis has, since (as far as I can tell) it's a completely open and deterministic algorithm that just lets you in if you solve the challenge, and as the author of the article demonstrated with some C code (if you don't want to run the included JavaScript that does it for you), that works even if you are a bot. And afaik that's the point: no heuristics and false positives but a straight game of costs; making bad scraping behavior simply cost more than implementing caching correctly or using commoncrawl

So yes, it is like having a stalker politely open the door for you as you walk into a shop, because they know very well who you are.

You know, you say that, and while I understand where you're coming from I was browsing the git repo when github had a slight error and I was greeted with an angry pink unicorn. If Github can be fun like that, Anubis can too, I think.

Anubis was originally an open source project built for a personnal blog. It gained traction but the anime girl remained so that people are reminded of the nature of the project. Comparing it with Cloudflare is truly absurd. That said, a paid version is available with guard page customization.

Nothing says, "Change out the logo for something that doesn't make my clients tingle in an uncomfortable way" like the MIT license.

If your boss doesn't want you to browse the web, where some technical content is accompanied by an avatar that the author likes, they may not be suitable as boss, or at least not for positions where it's their job to look over your shoulder and make sure you're not watching series during work time. Seems like a weird employment place if they need to check that anyway

If Anubis didn't ship with a weird looking anime girl I think people would treat it akin to Cloudflares block pages.

Laughable. They say this but anyone who actually surfs the web with a non-bleeding edge non-corporate browser gets constantly blocked by Cloudflare. The idea that their JS computational paywalls only pop up rarely is absurd. Anyone believing this line lacks lived experience. My Comcast IP shouldn't have a bad rep and using a browser from ~2015 shouldn't make me scary. But I can't even read bills on congress.gov anymore thanks to bad CF deployals.

Also, Anubis does have a non-JS mode: the HTML header meta-refresh based challenge. It's just that the type of people who use Cloudflare or Anubis almost always just deploy the default (mostly broken) configs that block as many human people as bots. And they never realize it because they only measure such things with javascript.