← Back to context

Comment by pinkmuffinere

3 days ago

I’ve been sitting on this page for two minutes and it’s still not sure whether I’m a bot lol. What did I do in a past life to deserve this :(

29 comments

pinkmuffinere

Reply
mxmlnkn  3 days ago

After 2 minutes at 150 kHashes on mobile, I finally see the first pixel of the progress bar filling up. Seems like it will take hours or a day to finish. Some estimate would have been nice.

  • drum55  3 days ago

    Ironically I used a LLM to write a bypass for this ridiculous tool, doing hashing in a browser makes no sense, Claude's very bad implementation of it in C does tens of megahash a second and passes all of the challenges nearly instantly. It took about 5 minutes for Claude to write that, and it's not even a particularly fast implementation, but it beats the pants off doing string comparisons for every loop in JavaScript which is what the Anubis tool does.

        for (; ;) {
        const hashBuffer = await calculateSHA256(data + nonce);
        const hashArray = new Uint8Array(hashBuffer);

        let isValid = true;
        for (let i = 0; i < requiredZeroBytes; i++) {
          if (hashArray[i] !== 0) {
            isValid = false;
            break;
          }
        }

    It's less proof of work and just annoying to users, and feel good to whoever added it to their site, I can't wait for it to go away. As a bonus, it's based on a misunderstanding of hashcash, because it is only testing zero bytes comparison with a floating point target (as in Bitcoin for example), the difficulty isn't granular enough to make sense, only a couple of the lower ones are reasonably solvable in JavaScript and the gaps between "wait for 90 minutes" and "instantly solved" are 2 values apart.

    • GeoAtreides  3 days ago

      >It's less proof of work and just annoying to users, and feel good to whoever added it to their site,

      this is being disproved in the article posted:

      >And so Anubis was enabled in the tar pit at difficulty 1 (lowest setting) when requests were pouring in 24/7. Before it was enabled, it was getting several hundred-thousand requests each day. As soon as Anubis became active in there, it decreased to about 11 requests after 24 hours, most just from curious humans.

      apparently it does more than annoying users and making the site owner feel good (well, i suppose effective bot blocking would make the site owner feel quite good)

      7 replies →

    • yborg  3 days ago

      Maybe post your brilliant solution to commercial companies with hundreds of millions in funding unrestrained bot scraping the Internet for AI training instead of complaining about people desperate to rein it in as individuals.

      2 replies →

  • raincole  3 days ago

    At this point I wonder if you can post a crypto miner page on HN and people will fall for it.

prewett  3 days ago

The cynic in me thinks that they’re mining bitcoin on our phones… And after completing, it claimed the page was misconfigured.