Some thoughts on how useful Anubis really is. Combined with comments I read elsewhere about scrapers starting to solve the challenges, I’m afraid Anubis will be outdated soon and we need something else.
Some thoughts on how useful Anubis really is. Combined with comments I read elsewhere about scrapers starting to solve the challenges, I’m afraid Anubis will be outdated soon and we need something else.
The current version of Anubis was made as a quick “good enough” solution to an emergency. The article is very enthusiastic about explaining why it shouldn’t work, but completely glosses over the fact that it has worked, at least to an extent where deploying it and maybe inconveniencing some users is preferable to having the entire web server choked out by a flood of indiscriminate scraper requests.
The purpose is to reduce the flood to a manageable level, not to block every single scraper request.
And it was/is for sure the lesser evil compared to what most others did: put the site behind Cloudflare.
I feel people that complain about Anubis have never had their server overheat and shut down on an almost daily basis because of AI scrapers 🤦
Yeah, I’m just wondering what’s going to follow. I just hope everything isn’t going to need to go behind an authwall.
The developer is working on upgrades and better tools. https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/avoiding-becoming-peg-dependency/
I’ll say the developer is also very responsive. They’re (ambiguous ‘they’, not sure of pronouns) active in a libraries-fighting-bots slack channel I’m on. Libraries have been hit hard by the bots: we have hoards of tasty archives and we don’t have money to throw resources at the problem.
The Anubis repo has an enbyware emblem fun fact :D
Yay! I won’t edit my comment (so your comment will make sense) but I checked and they also list they/them on their github profile
Is there a reason other than avoiding infrastructure centralization not to put a web server behind cloudflare?
Yes, because Cloudflare routinely blocks entire IP ranges and puts people into endless captcha loops. And it snoops on all traffic and collects a lot of metadata about all your site visitors. And if you let them terminate TLS they will even analyse the passwords that people use to log into the services you run. It’s basically a huge survelliance dragnet and probably a front for the NSA.
Cloudflare would need https keys so they could read all the content you worked so hard to encrypt. If I wanted to do bad shit I would apply at Cloudflare.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what “behind cloudflare” means in this context, but I have a couple of my sites proxied through cloudflare, and they definitely don’t have my keys.
I wouldn’t think using a cloudflare captcha would require such a thing either.
That’s because they just terminate TLS at their end. Your DNS record is “poisoned” by the orange cloud and their infrastructure answers for you. They happen to have a trusted root CA so they just present one of their own certificates with a SAN that matches your domain and your browser trusts it. Bingo, TLS termination at CF servers. They have it in cleartext then and just re-encrypt it with your origin server if you enforce TLS, but at that point it’s meaningless.
Oh, I didn’t think about the fact that they’re a CA. That’s a good point; thanks for the info.
Hmm, I should look up how that works.
Edit: https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/origin-configuration/ssl-modes/#custom-ssltls
They don’t need your keys because they have their own CA. No way I’d use them.
Edit 2: And with their own DNS they could easily route any address through their own servers if they wanted to, without anyone noticing. They are entirely too powerful. Is there some way to prevent this?
Out of curiosity, what’s the issue with Cloudflair? Aside from the constant worry they may strong arm you into their enterprise pricing if you’re site is too popular lol. I understand support open source, but why not let companies handle the expensive bits as long as they’re willing?
I guess I can answer my own question. If the point of the Fediverse is to remove a single point of failure, then I suppose Cloidflare could become a single point to take down the network. Still, we could always pivot away from those types of services later, right?
Cloudflare has IP banned me before for no reason (no proxy, no VPN, residential ISP with no bot traffic). They’ve switched their captcha system a few times, and some years it’s easy, some years it’s impossible.
Unless you have a dirty heatsink, no amount of hammering would make the server overheat
Are you explaining my own server to me? 🙄
What CPU do you have made after 2004 that doesn’t have automatic temperature control ?
I don’t think there is any, unless you somehow managed to disable it ?
Even a raspberry pi without a heatsink won’t overheat to shutdown
You are right, it is actually worse, it usually just overloads the CPU so badly that it starts to throttle and then I can’t even access the server via SSH anymore. But sometimes it also crashes the server so that it reboots, and yes that can happen on modern CPUs as well.
I still think captchas are a better solution.
In order to surpass them they have to run AI inference which is also comes with compute costs. But for legitimate users you don’t run unauthorized intensive tasks on their hardware.
They are much worse for accessibility, and also take longer to solve and are more distruptive for the majority of users.
Anubis is worse for privacy. As you have to have JavaScript enabled. And worse for the environment as the cryptographic challenges with PoW are just a waste.
Also reCaptcha types are not really that disturbing most of the time.
As I said, the polite thing you just be giving users the options. Anubis PoW running directly just for entering a website is one of the most rudest piece of software I’ve seen lately. They should be more polite, and just give an option to the user, maybe the user could chose to solve a captcha or run Anubis PoW, or even just having Anubis but after a button the user could click.
I don’t think is good practice to run that type of software just for entering a website. If that tendency were to grow browsers would need to adapt and straight up block that behavior. Like only allow access to some client resources after an user action.
Are you seriously complaining about an (entirely false) negative privacy aspect of Anubis and then suggest reCaptcha from Google is better?
Look, no one thinks Anubis is great, but often it is that or the website becoming entirely inaccessible because it is DDOSed to death by the AI scrapers.
First, I said reCaptcha types, meaning captchas of the style of reCaptcha. That could be implemented outside a google environment. Secondly, I never said that types were better for privacy. I just said Anubis is bad for privacy. Traditional captchas that work without JavaScript would be the privacy friendly way.
Third, it’s not a false proposition. Disabling JavaScript can protect your privacy a great deal. A lot of tracking is done through JavaScript.
Last, that’s just the Anubis PR slogan. Not the truth, as I said ddos mitigation could be implemented in other ways. More polite and/or environmental friendly.
Are you astrosurfing for anubis? Because I really cannot understand why something as simple as a landing page with a button “run PoW challenge” would be that bad
Anubis is not bad for privacy, but rather the opposite. Server admins explicitly chose it over commonly available alternatives to preserve the privacy of their visitors.
If you don’t like random Javascript execution, just install an allow-list extension in your browser 🤷
And no, it is not a PR slogan, it is the live experience of thousands of server admins (me included) that have been fighting with this for month now and are very grateful that Anubis has provided some (likely only temporary) relief from that.
And I don’t get what the point of an extra button would be when the result is exactly the same 🤷
The problem is that the purpose of Anubis was to make crawling more computationally expensive and that crawlers are apparently increasingly prepared to accept that additional cost. One option would be to pile some required cycles on top of what’s currently asked, but it’s a balancing act before it starts to really be an annoyance for the meat popsicle users.
That’s why the developer is working on a better detection mechanism. https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/avoiding-becoming-peg-dependency/
This post was originally written for ycombinator “Hacker” News which is vehemently against people hacking things together for greater good, and more importantly for free.
It’s more of a corporate PR release site and if you aren’t known by the “community”, calling out solutions they can’t profit off of brings all the tech-bros to the yard for engagement.