The bot situation on the internet is worse than you could imagine
gladeart.com
gladeart.com
I was hit with a pretty substantial botnet "distributed scraping" attack yesterday.
- About 400,000 different IP addresses over about 3 hours
- Mostly residential IP addresses
- Valid and unique user agents and referrers
- Each IP address would make only a few requests with a long delay in between requests
It would hit the server hard until the server became slow to respond, then it would back off for about 30 seconds, then hit hard again. I was able to block most of the requests with a combination of user agent and referrer patterns, though some legit users may be blocked.
The attack was annoying, but, the even bigger problem is that the data on this website is under license - we have to pay for it, and it's not cheap. We are able to pay for it (barely) with advertising revenue and some subscriptions.
If everyone is getting this data from their "agent" and scrapers, that means no advertising revenue, and soon enough no more website to scrape, jobs lost, nowhere for scrapers to scrape for the data, nowhere for legit users to get the data for free, etc.
But maybe (and likely for worse) LLMs will finally kill this model.
Unfortunately, what I think will happen - and indeed already is - is that the AI companies themselves will replace much of the WWW. Sites like the one I am talking about will cease to exist. AI companies, once they can no longer scrape (steal) the data will end up licensing the data themselves and replace us as the distributor to end users. Perhaps as a subscription add-on or also with an ad based model.
Which to some may be fine. Personally, I don't want a few centralized AI companies replacing the hundreds of thousands of independent websites online. Way too much centralized power there.
It's so much easier to know the truth when someone else tells me what it is and what to think about it.
How refreshing.
I hate ads and I hate having to use an ad blocker to be able to not go crazy in order to use the Internet.
You merely hate "having" to serve ads because it denies you profit from the people you're exploiting with those ads.
Why is your business more deserving to exist on the Internet than my usage??
The minute the internet dies for good, the chat bots will run half-locally and request payments to stop recommending VRAM enlarging pills.
Just like fail2ban is not very useful against a DDOS attack where each unique IP only makes a few requests with a large (hour+) delay in between requests. There is no clear "fail" in these requests, and the fail2ban database becomes huge and far too slow.
- 400,000 Unique IP addresses
- 1 to 3 requests per hour per IP addresses - with delays of over 60 minutes between each request.
- Legit request URLs, legit UA & referrer
Maybe Anubis would help, but it's also a risk for various reasons.
They even sell access to proxy servers that successfully evade cloudflare captchas automatically.
Greed and ignorance have taken over the tech industry.
In addition to pulling responses with huge amplification (40x, at least, for posting a single Facebook post to an empty audience), it's sending us traffic with fbclids in the mix. No idea why.
They're also sending tons of masked traffic from their ASN (and EC2), with a fully deceptive UserAgent.
The weirdest part though is that it's scraping mobile-app APIs associated with the site in high volume. We see a ton of other AI-training focused crawlers do this, but was surprised to see the sudden change in behavior on facebookexternalhit ... happened in the last week or so.
Everyone is nuts these days. Got DoSed by Amazonbot this month too. They refuse to tell me what happened, citing the competitive environment.
The click IDs are likely to make the traffic look more like a human who has clicked a link rather than a bot? That way it gets past simple filters that explicitly let such requests in before bothering to check that the source address of the request seems to be a DC rather than a residential IP.
> citing the competitive environment
All the companies are competing to be the biggest inconvenience to everyone else while scraping as much stuff as they can.
It's certainly possible. However, the traffic is still coming from Facebook's network with a FB proxy PTR record in DNS. Seems much more likely to fool your typical site owner than a bad actor.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. That is exactly what I think they would be doing. While it won't fool blocks that check source first it will fool those who allow requests with those IDs through because they can't afford to block their content appearing on the distraction media sites.
So the invisible hand is just a middle finger?
> Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash
And if you look up Hashcash on Wikipedia you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash which explains how Hashcash works in a fairly straightforward manner (unlike most math pages).
for (; ;) {
const hashBuffer = await calculateSHA256(data + nonce);
const hashArray = new Uint8Array(hashBuffer);
let isValid = true;
for (let i = 0; i < requiredZeroBytes; i++) {
if (hashArray[i] !== 0) {
isValid = false;
break;
}
}
Edit: oh i think you mean in c the string comparison short curcuits. I would expect the same to be true in javascript too. Its true in most languages.
Maybe you are just worried about general language overhead, which is a fair point. Is the anubis check even using multiple threads? For the c case, the real benefit wouldn't be if you can use C, but if you can use the GPU.
The whole thing is kind of silly though. SHA256 is a terrible choice of hash for PoW. They should be using argon2 or something memory heavy.
Modern bitcoin miners do a double sha256 hash and increment in just a little bit more than a single hash of work. The input is 80 bytes, which is two compression rounds of 64 bytes in sha256, only the data in the second round has changed (the appended nonce), so you don’t bother doing the first compression round again. With other quirks you can end up doing multiple hashes at once “asicboost” due to partial collisions within the input too.
But then again using sha256 doesn't make sense at all.
Normal and sane people understand this intuitively. If someone goes to a mechanic because their car is broken and the mechanic says "well, if you can tell that you car is broken, then you should be able to figure out how to fix it" - that mechanic would be universally hated and go out of business in months. Same thing for a customer complaining about a dish made for them in a restaurant, or a user pointing out a bug in a piece of software.
this is being disproved in the article posted:
>And so Anubis was enabled in the tar pit at difficulty 1 (lowest setting) when requests were pouring in 24/7. Before it was enabled, it was getting several hundred-thousand requests each day. As soon as Anubis became active in there, it decreased to about 11 requests after 24 hours, most just from curious humans.
apparently it does more than annoying users and making the site owner feel good (well, i suppose effective bot blocking would make the site owner feel quite good)
>difficulty 1 (lowest setting)
literally in the comment you're responding to
Literally the grandparent of the comment chain you're responding to.
Literally discussed throughout the whole comment section.
I dont think the person was claiming annubis doesnt work, they were disputing PoW is the reason it actually works.
I'll implement Anubis at low difficulty for all my projects and leave a decent llms.txt referenced in my sitemap and robots.txt so LLMs can still get relevant data for my site while.keeping bad bots out. I'm getting thousands of requests from China that have really increased costs, glad it seems the fix is rather easy.
It's even dumber than that, because by default anubis whitelists the curl user agent.
curl -H "User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/146.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" "https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/diff/?id=v7.0-rc5&id2=v7.0-rc4&dt=2"
<!doctype html><html lang="en"><head><title>Making sure you're not a bot!</title><link rel="stylesheet"
curl "https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/diff/?id=v7.0-rc5&id2=v7.0-rc4&dt=2"
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang='en'>
<head>
<title>kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git - Linux kernel source tree</title>In that case a better solution would be to take the site down altogether.
What a waste of time.
Is the theory here that OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI, Qwen, Z.ai etc are all either running bad scrapers via domestic proxies in Indonesia, or are buying data from companies that run those scrapers?
I want to know for sure. Who is paying for this activity? What does the marketplace for scraped data look like?
I bet lot of companies want to provide search results to AI agents.
The root sources of the traffic from residential proxies gets murky very quickly.
It's easy to follow the chain partway for some traffic, eg "Why are we receiving all this traffic from Digital Ocean? ... oh, it's their hero client Firecrawl, using a deceptive UserAgent" ... but it still leaves the obvious question about who the Firecrawl client is.
Res proxy traffic is insane these days. There is also plenty of grey-market snowshoe IPs available for the right price, from a handful of ASNs. I regularly see unified crawling missions by unknown agents using 1000+ "clean" IP addresses an hour.
Weird part #1 is that the traffic isn't for the most part shaped like crawler traffic. It's incredibly bursty, and heavily redundant, missing even the most obvious low hanging fruit optimizations.
Could be someone is using residential proxies to wrap AI agents' web traffic, but even so, there's a lot of pieces that don't really make sense, like why the traffic pattern is like being hit by a shotgun. It isn't just one request, but anywhere between 40 and 100 redundant requests.
A popular theory is that this is because of sloppy coding, AI companies are too rich to care, but then again that doesn't really add up. This isn't just a minor inefficiency, if it is "just" bad coding, they stand to gain monumental efficiency improvements by fixing the issues, in the sense of getting the data much faster, a clear competitive edge.
Really weird.
My unsubstantiated guess is the residential proxy/botnet is very unreliable, and that's why they fire so many request. Makes sense if it's sold as a service.
I can substantiate this a bit. Verified traffic from Amazonbot is too dumb to do anything with 429s. They will happily slam your site with more traffic than you can handle, and will completely ignore the fact that over half the responses are useless rate limits.
They say they honor REP, but Amazonbot will still hit you pretty persistently even with a full disallow directive in robots.txt
My website contains ~6000 unique data points in effectively infinite combinations on effectively infinite pages. Some of those combinations are useful for humans, but the AI-scrapers could gain a near-infinite efficiency improvement by just identifying as a bot and heeding my robots.txt and/or rel="nofollow" hints to access the ~500 top level pages which contain close to everything which is unique. They just don't care. All their efficiency attempts are directed solely toward bypassing blocks. (Today I saw them varying the numbers in their user agent strings: X15 rather than X11, Chrome/532 rather than Chrome/132, and so on...)
I love experimental data like this. So much better than gut reaction that was spammed when anubis was just introduced
The idea is to scare off bots and not normal humans.
On Safari or Orion it is merely extremely slow to load.
I definitely wouldn't use any of this on a site that you don't want delisted for cryptojacking.
Very annoying. And you can't filter them because they look like legitimate trafic.
On a page with differents options (such as color, size, etc...) they'll try all the combinaisons, eating all the ressources.
If you have a logging stack, you can easily find crawler/bot patterns, then flag candidate IP subnets for blocking.
It's definitely whackamole though. We are experimenting with blocking based on risk databases, which run between $2k and $10k a year depending on provider. These map IP ranges to booleans like is_vpn, is_tor, etc, and also contain ASN information. Slightly suspicious crawling behavior or keyword flagging combined with a hit in that DB, and you have a high confidence block.
All this stuff is now easy to homeroll with claude. Before it would have been a major PITA.
What is the point of these anti bot measures if organic HN traffic can nuke your site regardless? If this is about protecting information from being acquired by undesirable parties, then this site is currently operating in the most ideal way possible.
The information will eventually be ripped out. You cannot defeat an army with direct access to TSMC's wafer start budget and Microsoft's cloud infrastructure. I would find a different hill to die on. This is exactly like the cookie banners. No one is winning anything here. Publishing information to the public internet is a binary decision. If you need to control access, you do what Netflix and countless others have done. You can't have it both ways.
It also drives home that Anubis needs a time estimate for sites that don't use Anubis as a "can you run javascript" wall but as an actual proof of work mechanism that it purports to be its main mechanism
It shows a difficulty of "8" with "794 kilohashes per second", but what does that mean? I understand the 8 must be exponential (not literally that 8 hashes are expected to find 1 solution on average), but even as a power of 2, 2^8=256 I happen to know by heart, so thousands of hashes per second would then find an answer in a fraction of a second. Or if it's 8 bytes instead of bits, then you expect to find a solution after like 8 million hashes, which at ~800k is about ten seconds. There is no way to figure out how long the expected wait is even if you understand all the text on the page (which most people wouldn't) and know some shortcuts to do the mental math (how many people know small powers of 2 by heart)
PoW for page protection (every page load) is fundamentally different from PoW for form submission (one-time action). Anubis at difficulty 8 is asking browsers to find 8 leading zero bytes — that's billions of hashes on average.
For form spam protection, a ~200ms solve time in a WebWorker is enough to make bot operations uneconomical at scale (10,000 forms = 10,000 unique computations) while being invisible to humans. That's difficulty 2-3 depending on device.
For protecting every page view like Anubis does, the cost-benefit math is different and much harder to get right, because you're taxing every visitor on every request — not just on submit.
Why do you say that?
A less publicly-visible motive would be if they were building up accounts to use for paid-upvote schemes.
Digg's recent shutdown message talked about how bad and aggressive bots were. I'd love to see Kevin and Alex post in depth about lessons learned, Dead Internet, and call out social sites.
It looks like it's computing sha256 hashes. Such an ASIC friendly PoW has the downside that someone with ASICs would be able to either overwhelm the site or drive up the difficulty so high that CPUs can never get through.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260329052632/https://gladeart....
Should have have maybe prioritized differently...
> Here is a massive log file for some activity in the Data Export tar pit:
A bit of a privacy faux pas, no? Some visitors may be legitimate.
Not even a 404, just not available at all.
So I started searching for what these residential proxy networks actually are.
https://datadome.co/bot-management-protection/how-proxy-prov...
We need a better solution.
I think some of the folks running sites would rather have you go to the site and view the items “suggested based on your shopping history” (I consider these ads, the vendors might disagree), etc.
I’m more sympathetic to the people running sites than the LLM training scrapers, but these are two parties in a many-party game and neither one is perfectly aligned with users.
Web browsing is scraping, too.
I am not doing anything that I myself wouldn't do, it would just take me longer. I'm not mass-scraping, training new models, etc etc. I'm just using a helper tool to do some work for me.
If you prevent that, you are effectively saying: humans have to perform the manual labor of clicking and browsing through our site, they are not allowed to be helped in any way. I don't think this is the right answer.
One of the mistakes people assume is that AI capability means humanness. If you know exactly where to look, you can start to identify differences between improving frontier models and human cognition.
One concrete example from a forthcoming blog post of mine:
[begin]
In fact, CAPTCHAs can still be effective if you know where to look.
We ran 75 trials -- 388 total attempts -- benchmarking three frontier AI agents against reCAPTCHA v2 image challenges. We looked across two categories: static, where each image grid is an individual target, and cross-tile challenges, where an object spans multiple tiles.
On static challenges, the agents performed respectably. Claude Sonnet 4.5 solved 47%. Gemini 2.5 Pro: 56%. GPT-5: 23%.
On cross-tile challenges: Claude scored 0%. Gemini: 2%. GPT-5: 1%.
In contrast, humans find cross-tile challenges easier than static ones. If you spot one tile that matches the target, your visual system follows the object into adjacent tiles automatically.
Agents find them nearly impossible. They evaluate each tile independently, produce perfectly rectangular selections, and fail on partial occlusion and boundary-spanning objects. They process the grid as nine separate classification problems. Humans process it as one scene.
The challenges hardest for humans -- ambiguous static grids where the target is small or unclear -- are easiest for agents. The challenges easiest for humans -- follow the object across tiles -- are hardest for agents. The difficulty curves are inverted. Not because agents are dumb, but because the two systems solve the problem with fundamentally different architectures.
Faking an output means producing the right answer. Faking a process means reverse-engineering the computational dynamics of a biological brain and reproducing them in real time. The first problem can be reduced to a machine learning classifier. The second is an unsolved scientific problem.
The standard objection is that any test can be defeated with sufficient incentive. But fraudsters weren't the ones who built the visual neural networks that defeated text CAPTCHAs -- researchers were. And they aren't solving quantum computing to undermine cryptography. The cost of spoofing an iris scan is an engineering problem. The cost of reproducing human cognition is a scientific one. These are not the same category of difficulty.
[end]
Your key finding is that humans process the grid as one visual scene — but that's a finding about sighted cognition.
Isn't this, like most things, a sensitivity specificity tradeoff?
How many real humans should be blocked from your system to keep the bots out?
What is the Blackstone ratio of accessibility?
I can't believe people are still using this as a generic anti-AI argument even though a decade ago people were insisting that there's no way AI can have the capabilities that frontier LLMs have today. Moreover it's unclear whether the gap even exists. Even if we take the claim that the grid pattern is some sort of fundamental constraint that AI models can't surpass, it doesn't seem too hard to work around by infilling the grids pattern and presenting the 9 images to LLMs as one image.
Is not an anti-AI argument, it’s an open and unsolved question. Your optimism is appreciated, but the dismissal and assumption this is already solved is foolish and naive.
That’s how fast the landscape is changing.
And remember: while the report might have been released in 2024, it takes time to conduct research and publish. A good chunk of its data was likely from 2023 and earlier.
Is this actually a problem? Most of my requests claim to be Amazonbot but someone showed me they weren’t and I’ve forgotten how.
It's really awful as an indonesian, my indonesian isp regularly got blocked by HN as well :(
Maybe I’m a bot, I gave up waiting before the progress bar was even 1% done.
JA4 fingerprinting works decently for the residential proxies.
However residential proxies do have a weakness, since they need to maintain 2 separate TCP conenctions you can exploit RTT differences between layers 3 and 7 to detect if the connection to your server is being terminated somewhere along the path. Solutions exist that can reliably detect and block residential proxies, for example: https://layer3intel.com/tripwire
> "The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable, ..."
Three minutes, one pixel of progress bar, 2 CPUs at 100%, load average 4.3 ...
The site is not protected by Anubis, it's blocked by it.
Closed.
Good luck banning yourself from the future.
If a webstie takes so long to verify me I'll bounce. That's it.
Is this supposed to be a joke? Is the author expecting users to travel back in time and use a VPN so their IP is scrubbed from logs that will get published at any time, because that's something the author just obviously has the right to do?
> The EDPB explicitly identifies IP addresses as being personal data due to their ability to identify individual data subjects.[1]
Dickhead.
[1]: https://techgdpr.com/blog/is-an-ip-address-considered-person...
I know / we know lol
I may be missing something of course
People have a right to complete anonymity, and should be able to go across the majority of the Internet just as they can go across most of the country.
That’s what you are missing.
Don’t get me wrong, I am also in favour of a single government ID, but in terms of combatting identity fraud, accessing public resources like single-payer healthcare, and making it easier for a person to prove their identity to authorities or employers.
It should not be used as a pass card for fundamental rights that normally would have zero government involvement.
Why? (Am not trolling. Genuinely interested)
I walk out my front door in the UK and I am not anonymous. Every transaction I make either identifies me through bank, railway or other id, or quite simply by my face standing in front of the coffee seller. My walk down the road is observed by neighbours and postmen.
Should my government arrest me without cause or trample on my free speech rights, I get that’s a problem but I am not sure why being anonymous helps. Having rights upheld by the courts helps, well trained police who respect the law helps.
I am honestly open to debate on this but I do find the “what if Hitler took over government where would we be” to be a problematic argument not a final answer.
You're suggesting the same government that would violate your rights would then help prevent it? I don't follow. Any power structure (tiered or not) was wiped away by authoritarians, historically. They will not be helping in the worst case. Ideological capture (corruption) has already started eroding at UK rights and that took a much less overt effort. America has had a robust 3-branch system (executive, legislative, judiciary) corrupted by a singular cult of personality. THAT was highly unlikely to happen, but here we are.
With this being said, I do predict that anonymity on the web is going to be phased out. It will result in all sorts of changes to cultural norms across western nations that largely will curtail rights. I dread it.
Shouldn't we try tracing IP addresses and fining organizations for letting the traffic through or originating the traffic first? Seems a lot simpler.
>>> It will result in all sorts of changes to cultural norms across western nations
I quite agree - but I (hope / think) that the benefits can outweighs the downsides if done well. Those nations that do it well will I believe find a rocket like boost to society and industry perhaps akin to post 1945 world. Those who don’t will fall behind.
Are these the government? Is the bank the government? Is the rail company the government?
No? Then you have answered your own question.
A silo of identification between you and a service provider that uses the provider’s own tooling is still anonymity from government authoritarianism.
The fact that nearly all of these silos are leaky IRL - with the government eager to punch howitzer-sized holes through them for even more access - is not the point. It is a citizen-hostile flaw that needs patching through loophole-proof legislation, not an ID system that would violently eradicate any remaining separation of government from capitalism.
Remember: when government and capitalism rides in the same cart, it is called corporatism, and is the basis of Fascism. Which is what is happening to America.
The issue is we want “good” government and “good” corporate behaviour but not the bad. And knowing the difference especially ahead of time requires engaged citizenry, lots of feedback mechanisms that are not overwritten by corruption and noise in the mechanism (ie primaries materringnmore than elections is a feedback mechanism fail in my book)
And here is your argument’s fatal flaw: mistaking public works, that benefits the commons and society as a whole, with government tracking.
The two are NOT the same.
The implication being when gov and big business get together bad things do happen. My point is they can happen yes, but also same players can make good things happen - it depends on the players (and regulatory and reporting and voting and and and )
Government tracking can be good - tracking covid cases good, tracking criminals planning robberies good. It it can also be bad.
This is imo why this is such hard problem - there is no clear answers only something we want sensible courts to (quickly) decide upon based on good laws.
>The implication being when gov and big business get together bad things do happen. My point is they can happen yes, but also same players can make good things happen - it depends on the players (and regulatory and reporting and voting and and and )
I think you need to go back and take some elementary courses on economics and how governments operate.
Public works are not “government and corporations in the same cart”. If that’s what you are coming to, that only demonstrates your ignorance bleeding out all over the place.