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Comment by technion | Hacker News Reader

It really should be recognised just how many people are watching Cloudflare interstitials on nearly every site these days (and I totally get why this happens) yet making a huge amount of noise about Anubis on a very small amount of sites.

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I don't trip over CloudFlare except when in a weird VPN, and then it always gets out of my way after the challenge.

Anubis screws with me a lot, and often doesn't work.

I get one basically every time I go to gitlab.com on Firefox.

It is easy to pass the challange, but it isn't any better than Anubis.

It's the other way around for me sometimes — I've never had issue with Anubis, I frequently get it with CF-protected sites.

(Not to mention all the sites which started putting country restrictions in on their generally useful instruction articles etc — argh)

I’m planning a trip to France right now, and it seems like half the websites in that country (for example, ratp.fr for Paris public transport info) require me to check a CloudFlare checkbox to promise that I am a human. And of those that don’t, quite a few just plain lock me out...

And a lot of US sites don't work in France either, or they ban you after just a couple requests with no appeal...

I find the same when using some foreign sites. I think the operator must have configured that France is OK, maybe neighboring countries too, the rest of the world must be checked.

It's not hard to understand why though surely?

You might have to show a passport when you enter France, and have your baggage and person (intrusively) scanned if you fly there, for much the same reason.

People, some of them in positions of government in some nation states want to cause harm to the services of other states. Cloudflare was probably the easiest tradeoff for balancing security of the service with accessibility and cost to the French/Parisian taxpayer.

Not that I'm happy about any of this, but I can understand it.

The antagonists in this case are not state sponsored terrorists, instead it's AI bros DDoSing the internet.

I'm on an older system here, and both Cloudflare and Anubis entirely block me out of sites. Once you start blocking actual users out of your sites, it simply has gone too far. At least provide an alternative method to enter your site (e.g. via login) that's not hampered by erroneous human checks. Same for the captchas where you help train AIs by choosing out of a set of tiny/ noisy pictures. I often struggle for 5 to 10 minutes to get past that nonsense. I heard bots have less trouble.

Basically we're already past the point where the web is made for actual humans, now it's made for bots.

I gave up on a lot of websites because of the aggressive blocking.

> Once you start blocking actual users out of your sites, it simply has gone too far.

It has, scrapers are out of control. Anubis and its ilk are a desperate measure, and some fallout is expected. And you don't get to dictate how a non-commercial site tries to avoid throttling and/or bandwidth overage bills.

No, they are a lazy measure. Most websites that slap on these kinds of checks don't even bother with more human-friendly measures first.

Because I don't have the fucking time to deal with AI scraper bots. I went harder - anything even looking suspiciously close to a scraper that's not on Google's index [1] or has wget in its user agent gets their entire /24 hard banned for a month, with an email address to contact for unbanning.

That seems to be a pretty effective way for now to keep scrapers, spammers and other abusive behavior away. Normal users don't do certain site actions at the speed that scraper bots do, there's no other practically relevant search engine than Google, I've never ever seen an abusive bot hide as wget (they all try to emulate looking like a human operated web browser), and no AI agent yet is smart enough to figure out how to interpret the message "Your ISP's network appears to have been used by bot activity. Please write an email to xxx@yyy.zzz with <ABC> as the subject line (or click on this pre-filled link) and you will automatically get unblocked".

[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

> Normal users don't do certain site actions at the speed that scraper bots do

How would you know when you have already banned them.

Simple. A honeypot link in a three levels deep menu which no ordinary human would care about that, thanks to a JS animation, needs at least half a second for a human to click on. Any bot that clicks it in less than half a second gets the banhammer. No need for invasive tracking, third party integrations, whatever.

That does sound like a much human friendlier approach than Anubis. I agree that tarpits and honeypots are a good stopgap until the legal system catches up to the rampant abuse of these "AI" companies. It's when your solutions start affecting real human users just because they are not "normal" in some way that I stop being sympathetic.

FYI - you can communicate with the author of Anubis, who has already said she's working on ways to make sure that all browsers - links, lynx, dillo, midori, et cetera, work.

Unless you're paying Cloudflare a LOT of money, you won't get to talk with anyone who can or will do anything about issues. They know about their issues and simply don't care.

If you don't mind taking a few minutes, perhaps put some details about your setup in a bug report?

The annoying thing about cloudflare is that most of the time once you’re blocked: you’re blocked.

There’s literally no way for you to bypass the block if you’re affected.

Its incredibly scary, I once had a bad useragent (without knowing it) and half the internet went offline, I couldn’t even access documentation or my email providers site, and there was no contact information or debugging information to help me resolve it: just a big middle finger for half the internet.

I haven’t had issues with any sites using Anubis (yet), but I suspect there are ways to verify that you’re a human if your browser fails the automatic check at least.

Anubis checks proof of work so as long as JavaScript runs you will pass it.

A "digital no-fly-list" is hella cyberpunk, though.

The question might become, what side of the black wall are you going to be on?

Seriously though I do think we are going to see increasing interest in alternative nets, especially as governments tighten their control over the internet or even break away into isolated nation nets.

Paradoxically, the problem with an "alternative net" (which could be tunneled over the regular one) is keeping it alternative. It has to be kept small and un-influential in order to stay under the radar. If you end up with an "alternative" which is used by journalists and politicians, you've just reinvented the mainstream, and you're no longer safe from being hit by a policy response.

Think private trackers. The opposite of 4chan, which is an "alternative" that got too influential in setting the tone of the rest of the internet.

Not necessarily, Yggdrasil flies under the radar because it's inherently hard to block.

Tor even more so, the power of Tor is that the more people use it: the stronger it becomes to centralised adversaries.

The main issue with Tor is the performance of it though.

The truth is the internet was never designed or intended to host private information. It was created for scientists by scientists to share research papers. Capitalists perverted it.

I thought that the main issue with tor was that so many of the exit nodes are actually the FBI.

You don't ever have to leave the Tor network.

I host IRC on a hidden service, and even Facebook (lol) offers a hidden service endpoint.

All that is needed is for a critical mass of people and a decent index: and we successfully have reinvented "the wired" from Serial Experiments: Lain

CloudFlare is dystopic. It centralizes even the part of the Internet that hadn't been centralized before. It is a perfect Trojan horse to bypass all encryption. And it chooses who accesses (a considerable chunk of) the Internet and who doesn't.

Anubis looks much better than this.

> It is a perfect Trojan horse to bypass all encryption

Isn't any hosting provider also this?

Not necessarily.

FaaS: Yes.

IaaS: Only if you do TLS termination at their gateway, otherwise not really, they'd need to get into your operating system to get the keys which might not always be easy. They could theoretically MITM the KVM terminal when you put in your disk decryption keys but that seems unlikely.

It's literally insane. After Snowden, how the fuck did we ended up with a single US company terminating almost every TLS connection?

They don't have to terminate every TLS connection. That's just the happy path.

Now imagine your government provided internet agent gets blacklisted because your linked social media post was interpreted by an LLM to be anti-establishment, and we are painting a picture of our current trajectory.

I don't have to imagine

most of the people on this site work or worked for companies who enabled this or specifically sold it as a feature

we are all complicit

It could be a lot worse. Soccer rights-holders effectively shut-down the Cloudflare facilitated Internet in Spain during soccer matches to 'curb piracy'.

The Soccer rightsholders - LaLiga - claim more than 50% of pirate IPs illegally distributing its content are protected by Cloudflare. Many were using an application called DuckVision to facilitate this streaming.

Telefónica, the ISP, upon realizing they couldn’t directly block DuckVision’s IP or identify its users, decided on a drastic solution: blocking entire IP ranges belonging to Cloudflare, which continues to affect a huge number of services that had nothing to do with soccer piracy.

https://pabloyglesias.medium.com/telef%C3%B3nicas-cloudflare...

https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2025/02/19/cloudflare-takes-...

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/spain-providers-blocks-cl...

For me both are things that mostly show up for 1-3 seconds, then get replaced by the actual website. I suspect that's the user experience of 99% of people.

If you fall in the other 1% (e.g. due to using unusual browsers or specific IP ranges), cloudflare tends to be much worse

Even when not on VPN, if a site uses the CloudFlare interstitials, I will get it every single time - at least the "prove you're not a bot" checkbox. I get the full CAPTCHA if I'm on a VPN or I change browsers. It is certainly enough to annoy me. More than Anubis, though I do think Anubis is also annoying, mainly because of being nearly worthless.

You must be on a good network. You should run one of those "get paid to share your internet connection with AI companies" apps. Since you're on a good network you might make a lot of money. And then your network will get cloudflared, of course.

We should repeat this until every network is cloudflared and everyone hates cloudflare and cloudflare loses all its customers and goes bankrupt. The internet would be better for it.

Examples?

I hit Cloudflare's garbage about as much as I hit Anubis. With the difference that far more sites use Cloudflare than Anubis, thus Anubis is far worse at triggering false positives.

So yes, it is like having a stalker politely open the door for you as you walk into a shop, because they know very well who you are.

In a world full of robots that look like humans, the stalker who knows you and lets you in might be the only solution.

That stalker might itself be a bot though, so there's no solution.

That's called authentication. In the case of the stalker, by biometrics (facial recognition). This could be a solution

But that's not what Cloudflare does. Cloudflare guesses whether you are a bot and then either blocks you or not. If it currently likes you, bless your luck

> This could be a solution

Until the moment someone will figure out the generation of realistic enough 3d faces.

Ah true! I meant authentication in general by whatever means, which seems dystopian enough already, but indeed my post can be read as being about facial recognition being required to visit random websites... that's even worse! Don't give them ideas xD

Huh? What false positives does Anubis produce?

The article doesn't say and I constantly get the most difficult Google captchas, cloudflare block pages saying "having trouble?" (which is a link to submit a ticket that seems to land in /dev/null), IP blocks because user agent spoofing, errors "unsupported browser" when I don't do user agent spoofing... the only anti-bot thing that reliably works on all my clients is Anubis. I'm really wondering what kinds of false positives you think Anubis has, since (as far as I can tell) it's a completely open and deterministic algorithm that just lets you in if you solve the challenge, and as the author of the article demonstrated with some C code (if you don't want to run the included JavaScript that does it for you), that works even if you are a bot. And afaik that's the point: no heuristics and false positives but a straight game of costs; making bad scraping behavior simply cost more than implementing caching correctly or using commoncrawl

I've had Anubis repeatedly fail to authorize me to access numerous open source projects, including the mesa3d gitlab, with a message looking something like "you failed".

As a legitimate open source developer and contributor to buildroot, I've had no recourse besides trying other browsers, networks, and machines, and it's triggered on several combinations.

Interesting, I didn't even know it had such a failure mode. Thanks for the reply, I'll sadly have to update my opinion on this project since it's apparently not a pure "everyone is equal if they can Prove the Work" system as I thought :(

I'm curious how, though, since the submitted article doesn't mention that and demonstrates curl working (which is about as low as you can go on the browser emulation front), but no time to look into it atm. Maybe it's because of an option or module that the author didn't have enabled

It sounds[1] like this was an issue with assumptions regarding header stability. Hopefully as people update their installations things will improve for us end users.

[1]: https://anubis.techaro.lol/blog/release/v1.20.0/#chrome-wont...

Thank goodness. It was feeling quite dystopian being caught in a bot dragnet that blocked me from resources that are relevant and vital to my work.

That says something about the chosen picture, doesn't it? Probably that it's not well liked. It certainly isn't neutral, while the Cloudfare page is.

Anubis was originally an open source project built for a personnal blog. It gained traction but the anime girl remained so that people are reminded of the nature of the project. Comparing it with Cloudflare is truly absurd. That said, a paid version is available with guard page customization.

You know, you say that, and while I understand where you're coming from I was browsing the git repo when github had a slight error and I was greeted with an angry pink unicorn. If Github can be fun like that, Anubis can too, I think.

I don't think you want to suggest that everyone must like it?

Yeah, but do people like that? It feels pretty patronizing to me in a similar way. Like "Weee! So cute that our website is broken, good luck doing your job! <3"

Reminds me of the old uwu error message meme.

> patronizing

I think it's reasonable and fair, and something you are expected to tolerate in a free world. In fact, I think it's rather unusual to take this benign and inconsequential thing as personal as you do.

Not at all. I can't stand it either. It's definitely patronising and infantile. I tolerate the silliness, grit my teeth and move on but it wears away at my patience.

This is why I add anime catgirls to nearly everything I build. I'm glad the effort isn't in vain!

I think I'd be down for anime catgirls in my builds. Something particularly anti-corporate about that I could get behind.

Nothing says, "Change out the logo for something that doesn't make my clients tingle in an uncomfortable way" like the MIT license.

Keep in mind that the author explicitly asks you not to do this, and offers a paid white label version. You can still do it yourself, but maybe you shouldn’t.

That's a good point and I didn't know that.

I wonder why the anime girl is received so badly. Is it because it's seen as childish? Is it bad because it confuses people (i.e. don't do this because other don't do this)?

Thinking about it logically, putting some "serious" banner there would just make everything a bit more grey and boring and would make no functional difference. So why is it disliked so much?

Because the world is full of haters?

I personally find anime kind of cringe but that's just a matter of taste.

The GitHub unicorn doesn't look as if it came out of a furry dev's wank bank.

Who are you to judge what's a wank bank and what's not? And what wank bank do you go to? The logo doesn't even have breasts.

I'm glad that they kept the anime girl rather than replacing her with a sterile message. The Internet should be a fun place again.

Why? It has sexual connotations, and it involves someone under the age of consent. As wikipedia puts it: "In a 2010 critique of the manga series Loveless, the feminist writer T. A. Noonan argued that, in Japanese culture, catgirl characteristics have a similar role to that of the Playboy Bunny in western culture, serving as a fetishization of youthful innocence."

> Thinking about it logically

This isn't about logic.

> This isn't about logic.

Clearly you proved that. What has sexual connotations is wildly subjective and plucking the opinion of one author/poet's critique from 15 years ago doesn't make it fact today.

It's about perception and feelings. If anime cat girls have sexual connotations (for a large enough group), that's the way it is. That critique didn't come out of thin air, and its age is hardly relevant. The association has been established. If you use a symbol that has a certain association, you shouldn't be surprised if people react to that association when they encounter that symbol.

There's nothing wrong with "subjective", by the way. You seem to think it discredits something (can't say what exactly), but this topic is subjective. It's not about logic (as if anything outside maths ever is).

Both are equally terrible - one doesn't require explanations to my boss though

If your boss doesn't want you to browse the web, where some technical content is accompanied by an avatar that the author likes, they may not be suitable as boss, or at least not for positions where it's their job to look over your shoulder and make sure you're not watching series during work time. Seems like a weird employment place if they need to check that anyway

we have customers in our offices pretty much every day, I think "no anime girls on screens" is a fair request

I fail to see how this particular "anime girl" and the potential for clients seeing it, could make you think that's a fair request. That seems extremely ridiculous to me.

It's an MIT licensed, open project. Fork it and change the icon to your favorite white-bread corporate logo if you want. It would probably take less time than complaining about it on HN.

I think the complaint is rather that you don't know when it will rear its face on third-party websites that you are visiting as part of work. Forking wouldn't help with not seeing it on other sites

(Even if I agree that the boss or customers should just get over it. It's not like they're drawing genitalia on screen and it's also easily explainable if they don't already know it themselves.)

Add a rule to your adblocker for the image, then. The main site appears to have it at `anubis.techaro.lol/.within.website/x/cmd/anubis/static/img/happy.webp?cacheBuster=v1.21.3-43-gb0fa256`, so a rule for `||*/.within.website/x/cmd/anubis/static/img/$image` ought to work for ublock origin (purely a guess regarding wildcards for domain, I've never set a rule without a domain before)

(For the record, I like the image)

If Anubis didn't ship with a weird looking anime girl I think people would treat it akin to Cloudflares block pages.

Which means they'd still hate it and find it annoying

We can make noise about both things, and how they're ruining the internet.

Cloudflare's solution works without javascript enabled unless the website turns up the scare level to max or you are on an IP with already bad reputation. Anubis does not.

But at the end of the day both are shit and we should not accept either. That includes not using one as an excuse for the other.

Laughable. They say this but anyone who actually surfs the web with a non-bleeding edge non-corporate browser gets constantly blocked by Cloudflare. The idea that their JS computational paywalls only pop up rarely is absurd. Anyone believing this line lacks lived experience. My Comcast IP shouldn't have a bad rep and using a browser from ~2015 shouldn't make me scary. But I can't even read bills on congress.gov anymore thanks to bad CF deployals.

Also, Anubis does have a non-JS mode: the HTML header meta-refresh based challenge. It's just that the type of people who use Cloudflare or Anubis almost always just deploy the default (mostly broken) configs that block as many human people as bots. And they never realize it because they only measure such things with javascript.

Over the past few years I've read far more comments complaining about Cloudflare doing it than Anubis. In fact, this discussion section is the first time I've seen people talking about Anubis.

TO BE FAIR

I dislike those even more.

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