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 Combined with comments I read elsewhere about scrapers starting to solve the challenges, I’m afraid Anubis will be outdated soon and we need something else.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 Combined with comments I read elsewhere about scrapers starting to solve the challenges, I’m afraid Anubis will be outdated soon and we need something else.
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 🤦
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.
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 🤷
Latest version of Anubis has a JavaScript-free verification system. It isn’t as accurate, so I allow js-free visits only if the site isn’t being hammered. Which, tbf, prior to Anubis no one was getting in, JS or no JS.
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/
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?