3w ago

Anubis, The Opensource Defender Against AI Bots: I fight bots in my free time

xeiaso.net

I fight bots in my free time

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Technology @programming.dev

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3w ago

Anubis, The Opensource Defender Against AI Bots: I fight bots in my free time

xeiaso.net /talks/2025/bsdcan-anubis/

18 comments

Cool project. The closing slide was pretty funny
If you are working at an AI company, here's how you can sabotage Anubis development as easily and quickly as possible. So first is quit your job, second is work for Square Enix, and third is make absolute banger stuff for Final Fantasy XIV. That’s how you can sabotage this the best.
Why does default config check Mozilla specifically?

{ "name": "generic-browser", "user_agent_regex": "Mozilla", "action": "CHALLENGE" }
Guess that's why I've seen Anubis check screen quite a few times.
- Afaik, almost every browser uses "Mozilla/5.0" as part of the user agent, Mozilla mentions it as well in developer docs about User agents, it's a historical compatibility thing apparently.
  
  Interesting, thanks!
  Guess it's the same kinda thing as amd64 on Intel lol
- The creator of Anubis did an interview on the Selfhosted Show podcast a little while back and explains this in detail, and it’s worth a listen.
  Here’s a time stamped link for the interview
  
  Great interview! The whole proof-of-work approach is fascinating, and reminds me of a very old email concept he mentions in passing, where an email server would only accept a msg if the sender agreed to pay like a dollar. Then the user would accept the msg, which would refund the dollar. So this would end up costing legitimate senders nothing but would require spammers to front way too much money to make email spamming affordable. In his version the sender must do a processor-intensive computation, which is fine at the volume legitimate senders use but prohibitive for spammers.
  
  Thanks!
Is this the first seed of the Blackwall?
I use the lynx browser sometimes, for hacker news, some blogs that I follow, or just for a quick browse to find an answer.
The fact that more and more websites need to use this kind of protection is saddening me, since lynx doesn't support JavaScript.
That's just another reason why I fucking hate AI.
I don't hate it, I /fucking/ hate AI.
- You can bypass it by changing the user agent to not include Mozilla in the beginning.
My hero in shining armour (not a sarcasm, just a form of appreciation of someone who did what I would never have done)
Seems like it screens out bots regardless of whether they use AI or are just traditional asshole-created bots.
- It does, yes. This will prevent your content from being indexed, in most cases. The benefit is that your servers will be up. If your servers are down, they can't be indexed either
Interesting. I clicked on a link here a couple weeks ago and was presented with this and wasn't really sure what it was. Thanks for sharing this! It seems like a good alternative.

18 comments