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Comment by rzmmm | Hacker News Reader

It does work, at least in my experience. The challenge may be cheap for your n-of-1 but keep in mind the scraper bots are crawling number of domains with very high concurrency.

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And without control of their source IP addresses. They use a "rotating proxy" meta-proxy which sends each request through a different proxy, which invalidates the Anubis response and triggers a new challenge.

Real attackers fuck. If they have IP address control issues they will fix them. The bots being stopped are the silly ones.

Okay. That's good enough. The problem people using Anubis have is not "I'm being targeted for a DDoS" and is actually "my site is being incidentally DDoS'd because scrapers are DDoSing the entire internet". A solution to the latter is what people need. Every single one of these threads comes up with hypotheticals about how useless Anubis is and how it can't possibly work and yet it does work for the real-world problem that real-world webmasters are dealing with.

Right: It's a threat-modeling mistake to start lumping different groups with different goals and different operational constraints together.

Sure, the cheap lock I added to the outside shed's door-latch is terrible and can be shimmed open in two seconds with a bit of flat metal... but the important thing right now is that it keeps the raccoons out. If there's a new threat to the gardening tools or the bikes, then I have a different problem and I'll consider something else.

If every site does it the scrapers will adapt. The scrapers will always have a cost advantage over real users for this.

Most of the problem in this case is that the scrapers are being incredibly lazy and not investing even minimal effort in their approach. If this forces them to revisit how they go about things then mission accomplished.

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