Comment by anarki8
2 days ago
Article might be a bit shallow, or maybe my understanding of how Anubis works is incorrect?
1. Anubis makes you calculate a challenge.
2. You get a "token" that you can use for a week to access the website.
3. (I don't see this being considered in the article) "token" that is used too much is rate limited. Calculating a new token for each request is expensive.
That, but apparently also restrictions on what tech you can use to access the website:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44970290 mentions of other requirements that are allegedly on purpose to block older clients (as browser emulators presumably often would appear to be, because why would they bother implementing newer mechanisms when the web has backwards compatibility)
That's the basic principle. It's a tool to fight to crawlers that spam requests without cookies to prevent rate limiting.
The Chinese crawlers seem to have adjusted their crawling techniques to give their browsers enough compute to pass standard Anubis checks.