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 Combined with comments I read elsewhere about scrapers starting to solve the challenges, I’m afraid Anubis will be outdated soon and we need something else.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 Combined with comments I read elsewhere about scrapers starting to solve the challenges, I’m afraid Anubis will be outdated soon and we need something else.
To solve it or not do not change that they have to use more resources for crawling, which is the objective here. And by contrast, the website sees a lot less load compared to before the use of Anubis. In any case, I see it as a win.
But despite that, it has its detractors, like any solution that becomes popular.
But let’s be honest, what are the arguments against it?
It takes a bit longer to access for the first time? Sure, but that’s not like you have to click anything or write anything.
It executes foreign code on your machine? Literally 90% of the web does these days. Just disable JavaScript to see how many website is still functional. I’d be surprised if even a handful does.
The only people having any advantages at not having Anubis are web crawler, be it ai bots, indexing bots, or script kiddies trying to find a vulnerable target.
Sure, I’m not arguing against Anubis! I just don’t think the added compute cost is sufficient to keep them out once they adjust.
Conceptually, you could just really twist the knobs up. A human can wait to read a page for 15 seconds. But you’re trying to scrape 100,000 pages and they each take 15 seconds… You can make it expensive in both power and time that’s a win.