Comment by lxgr
15 hours ago
> 66% of scrapers are turned away directly.
Until they discover this neat trick [1] and solve challenges orders of magnitudes more efficiently than legitimate users.
The game theory of Anubis is not sound. It makes fundamentally less sense than Captchas, and even those have been on the way out for a while.
It doesn’t have to be fully sound, it’s there to provide _some_ degree of interim protection.
Evidently, it makes _enough_ of a difference for the people running it. Criticising it is just letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
The alternative to Anubis isn’t “something better that isn’t being picked”, it’s “completely unprotected”, and the people criticising it for being imperfect could helpfully move the conversation forward by actively suggesting a concrete alternative.
Sure, but then you’re essentially just doing versions of the old “what is 2+2” text captchas with extra computational steps, so why not save yourself and your users those?