Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

4 days ago

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Anubis is a hybrid art project and network countermeasure that blocks AI crawlers by requiring visitors to solve a SHA-256 challenge.
The challenge involves brute-forcing a value to make the SHA-256 hash start with leading zeroes, similar to Bitcoin mining.
Anubis claims this makes crawling too expensive for AI vendors, but the cost is negligible for large-scale crawlers.
The default difficulty level (4 leading zeroes) requires ~2^16 operations, which is trivial for modern compute resources.
A quick calculation shows that mining tokens for all Anubis-protected sites would cost less than a cent per month.
Anubis is inspired by hashcash, a 90s anti-spam solution, but its effectiveness against AI crawlers is questionable.
A C program can easily mine the required tokens, and the auth cookie can be reused due to a bug (now fixed).
The system inconveniences human users more than AI crawlers, as it requires extra steps to access protected resources.

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