Comment by shkkmo

Comment by shkkmo 4 days ago

> Stop whining about free projects/labour man. The same people comment oh well these AI scrapers are scraping so many websites and taking livelihood of website makers and now you have someone who just gave it to ya for free and you are nitpicking the wrong things.

That isn't the issue. The issue is that this tool is not fit for purpose and is inappropriate to be used by the projects that have adopted it.

The proof of work scheme is idiotic. As explained in the article, it's super easy to mine enough tokens to bypass for any bad actors, while it interfers and wastes the time of good actors.

It's almost like the author deliberately designed a tool that only looks like it is doing something while actually trivially allowing the very thing it was supposedly built to prevent.

Imustaskforhelp 3 days ago

Hm yea this is a fair critisicm actually as I also said in some other comment just now that we need to discuss more about if anubis is actually being useful or not at what its saying.

You raise a good point man, what do you suggest should be done instead of what anubis is doing right now for the same outcome(getting not effectively ddosed by AI scrapers) ?

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shkkmo 3 days ago

The undelying point is mentioned early in the article:
> The traditional solution to blocking nuisance crawlers is to use a combination of rate limiting and CAPTCHAs. The CAPTCHA forces vistors to solve a problem designed to be very difficult for computers but trivial for humans. This isn’t perfect of course, we can debate the accessibility tradeoffs and weaknesses, but conceptually the idea makes some sense.
> Anubis – confusingly – inverts this idea. It insists visitors solve a problem trivial for computers, but impossible for humans.
Fundementally, the idea that PoW is a good way to tell humans from bots just doesn't work.
Captchas, rate limiting, authentication, etc are all part of the solution.
The more bespoke a captcha solution is, the less likely that bots, especially the kind of low effort bots that ignore rate limits and hammer sites, will have the ability to break it.
Arguably, anubis has a much better harm-vs-protection ratio at much lower difficulty setting where it functions less as a PoE system and more as an obscure way to block lowe effort bots. Of course, the more it gets adopted, the less well this will work.

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