Comment by ChocolateGod

3 days ago

I have a S24 (flagship of 2024) and Anubis often takes 10-20 seconds to complete, that time is going to add up if more and more sites adopt it, leaning to a worse browsing experience and wasted battery life.

Meanwhile AI farms will just run their own nuclear reactors eventually and be unaffected.

I really don't understand why someone thought this was a good idea, even if well intentioned.

9 comments

ChocolateGod

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prmoustache  3 days ago

Something must be wrong on your flagship smartphone because I have an entry level one that doesn't take that long.

It seems there is a large number of operations crawling the web to build models that aren't using directly infrastructure hosted on AI farms BUT botnet running on commodity hardware and residencial networks to circumvent their ip range from being blacklisted. Anubis point is to block those.

Aachen  2 days ago

Which browser and which difficulty setting is that?

Because I've got the same model line but about 3 or 4 years older and it usually just flashes by in the browser Lightning from F-droid which is an OS webview wrapper. On occasion a second or maybe two, I assume that's either bad luck in finding a solution or a site with a higher difficulty setting. Not sure if I've seen it in Fennec (firefox mobile) yet but, if so, it's the same there

I've been surprised that this low threshold stops bots but I'm reading in this thread that it's rather that bot operators mostly just haven't bothered implementing the necessary features yet. It's going to get worse... We've not even won the battle let alone the war. Idk if this is going to be sustainable, we'll see where the web ends up...

jeroenhd  2 days ago

Either your phone is on some extreme power saving mode, your ad blocker is breaking Javascript, or something is wrong with your phone.

I've certainly seen Anubis take a few seconds (three or four maybe) but that was on a very old phone that barely loaded any website more complex than HN.

TZubiri  3 days ago

I remember that LiteCoin briefly had this idea, to be easy on consumer hardware but hard on GPUs. The ASICs didn't take long to obliterate the idea though.

Maybe there's going to be some form of pay per browse system? even if it's some negligible cost on the order of 1$ per month (and packaged with other costs), I think economies of scale would allow servers to perform a lifetime of S24 captchas in a couple of seconds.