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Comment by inigyou

10 hours ago

What's actually stopping them isn't the PoW, it's the customisation effort. If one site has Anubis nothing scrapes it. If many sites have Anubis they write counter scrapers. Today if you make a slight change to the Anubis algorithm on your site, they'll burn CPU endlessly computing hashes with the original algorithm and submitting wrong ones.

The author of Anubis hates this fact and will ban you if you mention it, so don't. He insists it's the PoW.

Searching around for this, found "make users click the mouse three times"[1] as an anti-bot idea. Generally, makes sense that smaller site owners can make small customizations to existing anti-bot tech and see positive results until they're either (1) deemed valuable enough to receive custom attention or (2) the scrapers include LLM-based anti-antibot methods.

>will ban you if you mention it

Even if mentioned really politely?

[1] would hope anyone trying this makes it accessible to visitors with disabilities

  • Ask your visitors “what does it feel like being you?”

    Anyone who responds with something like:

    > I don’t have subjective feelings, consciousness, or an inner point of view, so there isn’t a sensation of “being me.”

    is definitely an LLM.