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I agree - the article is interesting and not dismissive.

I was talking more about some of the people here ;)

I still don't understand what Anubis solves if it can be bypassed too easily: If you use User-agent switcher (i emulate wget) as firefox addon on kernel.org or ffmpeg.org you save the entire check time and straight up skip Anubis. Apparently they use a whitelist for user-agents due to allowing legitimate wget usage on these domains. However if I (an honest human can) the scrapers and grifters can too.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/

If anyone wants to try themselves. This is by no means against Anubis, but raising the question: Can you even protect a domain if you force yourself to whitelist (for a full bypass) easy to guess UAs?

It's extra work for scrapers. They pretend to be upstanding citizens (Chrome UA from residential IPs). You can more easily block those.

A lot of scrapers are actually utilizing some malware installed on residential user's machines, so the request is legitimately coming from a chrome UA on a residential ip.

Well, “actually”, perhaps; “legitimately” is still a stretch.

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