Comment by Aachen
13 hours ago
> requiring 1 second of compute before allowing a page load
After 1 solve, you get a cookie and can load tons of pages with it. Scrapers and user agents alike will need to spend the compute only once to get a valid session for themselves
Seems to be working so far though. Fwiw, lots of silly things stop bots until someone puts their mind (or tokens) to bypassing it, and then the blocking mechanism has to adapt. We'll see how it plays out, for now it's a lot better than begging big brother (cloudflare, google, or amazon captcha) for access, so I'm quite appreciative of what Techaro is doing
The issue is that scrapers are rotating their IP and essentially performing a DDoS attack. Anubis is part of a defense-in-depth solution. If scrapers reuse a cookie, traditional anti-abuse mechanisms will work.
>If scrapers reuse a cookie, traditional anti-abuse mechanisms will work.
Scrapers can't change their strategy? It's not hard to think of mitigations: keep on using a session until you're banned, and failing that rotate your IP. Nowadays you don't even need to think. You can probably tell a LLM "write me a scraper that has adaptive anti-anti-bot mechanism".
> Scrapers can't change their strategy?
Yes, but you normally don't try to fight all strategies up front, you add stuff on a need-to basis. Currently, lots of people are in the stage of "need to get this thing using bunch of IPs to stop hammering my servers", apparently Anubis helps them with that. If that stops working, other tactics are tried, and so it goes on for the life of your service. Hasn't stopped yet, doesn't seem to be stopped soon either.
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Plenty of these abusive scrapers are utilizing retail residential proxies, which will be applying forced rotations to avoid "burning" their compromised and or otherwise surreptitiously utilized IP address.
https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/creepy-crawlies reports anubis effectiveness falling off
I would disagree with the Anubis effectiveness falling off, but the llm bros are throwing life itself into training to defeat any “perceived” challenge.
If you change your IP address, it invalidates the cookie. If you don't change your IP address, you can be blocked by IP address.