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Comment by semiquaver | Hacker News Reader

Oddly enough I can’t access that site, it just heats up my phone solving hashes. Gave up after about a minute and anubis had only made it less than halfway through.

I doubt the real bots have any trouble bypassing it.

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It's puzzling how mild the reactions are to Anubis compared to the people reacting to seeing one singular Cloudflare captcha checkbox. I'd much rather a checkbox than a brief CPU-intensive hashing session.

I think when people are complaining about Captcha they're complaining about yet another "pick 6-20 pictures of traffic lights/school busses/stairs/stop signs/bicycles."

If they want to train an AI they should pay for it like everyone else. Modern bots have zero problems solving these, it's just free training for them.

> If they want to train an AI they should pay for it like everyone else.

They're paying for electricity and taking data without paying for it. It seems to me that they're paying for it exactly the same way everyone else in AI did.

Does the bot include the rider when identifying bicycles? When is an ebike a motorcycle/no longer a bicycle? The support structure for a traffic light or just the coloured light bits?

Not in this case. I wish I could find the actual post, but I recall reading a post on HN recently where a majority of the commenters were claiming that when they even see a Cloudflare verification checkbox that they leave the website.

This makes no sense to me as in my experience, you click the checkbox and then it verifies you without extra steps.

Usually but not always. The challenge is after clicking the checkbox, if it can't manage to verify automatically. So those users have learned not to bother.

On my favorite browser (Opera Mobile with desktop mode) Cloudflare verification never works. It just says "failed, please try again" forever.

For me it's very strange: I'd say about 7 times out of 10 it loads the checkbox for five to ten seconds, then I check it, then it loads for another five to ten seconds, refreshes the page, shows me a second checkbox, we go through the whole song and dance again, and then it lets me in.

> rather a checkbox than a brief CPU-intensive hashing session.

oh is that why my raspberry pi 5 can't browse websites anymore without freezing for a minute.

Anubis is usually less obtrusive than that, though. This is the longest anubis challenge I've ever had, to the point of being absurd. Hopefully they have a genuine reason for having set the difficulty so high.

I wonder if it's a bug/issue with specific browsers.

It's near instant on desktop (Windows/FF/7950X3D) and I wouldn't expect the delta to be that large against a modern mobile device.

> I wonder if it's a bug/issue with specific browsers.

Seems like it. It loaded near instantly as well from my Android smartphone using Firefox.

Safari takes minutes, FF is near instant on a M4 air.

And contrary to the directions, refreshing the page DOES help.

Cloudflare doesn’t work most of the time for me. I’ve seen nothing on this site on my iPhone 12 mini.

A zero-interaction screen is better. If I can open it in a new tab and then come back and it's fully loaded, it's good.

Unfortunately, those tools are there specifically to detect and block "zero-interaction activity".

I thought it just hashed something...

I expect the complaints would be fewer if it was a smaller thing, or if everyone had their own version rather than it feeling like one company deciding if you should be able to use a large fraction of the internet.

Cloudflare doesn't even let my browser (qutebrowser) through. Anubis will sometimes sit and ask for ridiculous amounts of work, but at least it's never outright denied access.

Cloudflare checkboxes don't come with pictures of underage girls

Why do you have a problem with this?

I was explaining this part

> how mild the reactions are to Anubis compared to the people reacting to seeing one singular Cloudflare captcha checkbox

Ahh. My apologies, I seem to have interpreted your comment roughly opposite to how you intended it.

Solving one captcha is mildly annoying. Being trapped in an infinite captcha loop will really grind your gears and eat away at your spirit.

Having my CPU go up for a while is nearly frictionless on the other hand. Worst case I'm stuck in a loop and the site isn't loaded when I get back to it, which is better than being stuck in a captcha loop and then not getting to the site.

Of course, not having to do any of that would be even better. I wish the concept of ZeroNet had caught on, where everything is hosted and served peer-to-peer. This gives you basically zero hosting costs and you are immune to DDOS.

The proof-of-work approach is much better privacy-wise than what the usual CAPTCHA services are doing.

My ungrounded speakers have a tendency to pop and make noise when they come out of sleep (sleep? on a speaker? fuck you logitec) and every time these "simple" CAPTCHAs come up, even if I pass without solving their logic puzzles, I hear the speakers activate as the Javascript on the page is figuring out what kind of audio setup I have by playing a silent sound file.

The default Anubis config isn't really a problem for any devices I've tried, but the FFMPEG Anubis setup is quite extreme. I seem to be served the extra-difficult Javascript challenge, as well as a high-difficulty challenge, that takes even powerful computers quite a long time to complete.

Could just be countermeasures to the hug of death every website gets when they get linked on HN, though, but someone would need to set up auto-scaling for that.

proof of work requires my computer do do something and not me

cloudflare requires me to work for them

Well, Anubis actually lets me through eventually and most are very fast. Even this one is minimal compared to Cloudflare, which before I had to block its scripts entirely would just max out one CPU indefinitely (or at least a few hours, I found by accident, with no indication of stopping).

The Cloudflare captcha checkbox fingerprints the crap out of your browser. It's an opaque risk-based thing, which is the worst. Anubis just makes your browser brute force hashes, that's it.

It also took insanely long on my iPhone 16. "Made with heart in Canada" but configured poorly.

It's a pity about the web, because it's becoming less accessible over time. Regardless, I (and some others) archive many of the things we browse to, so here you go:

https://amber.agentic.church/web/lists.ffmpeg.org/2026082807...

Apparently, not the fonts they use for icons.

their anubis difficulty is wayyy to high; 6 is overkill

Yeah, is it trying to mine bitcoin or something? Anubis usually takes a second but here I waited a minute and got 20% through on a modern phone.

Presumably they've configured it to use a higher difficulty challenge due to high rates of scraping on their bugtracker

Difficulty 6 which some parts of FFmpeg use, is about the highest difficulty you can assign with the default Anubis config. For me personally I only serve that difficulty if I'm near certain the user is a bot. Serving it to everyone sure is a choice.

happy to report my bots have no trouble with anubis or any other pow mechanism, little bit of deno and i'm right through.

The point is to deter bots that are scraping thousands to millions of websites in parallel, not user agents.

It took around 15kJ to access the site... that's a proper waste and somewhat sad, even though I understand.

So, about $0.001 of electricity. The nerve!

A typical GPT5 or DeepSeek-R1 AI request uses about 100kJ

it's putting full load on my 6core 11th gen i5 machine for more than a minute. i just closed it..

Took less than a minute in my 5 year old xiaomi phone. It did take way longer than other Anubis sites I've seen.

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