Hacker News

points by miki123211 3 days ago | 0 comments

> The web is getting harder and harder to use

What are you doing to make this true?

I'm a screen reader user (which is as "weird and unusual" as it gets when fingerprinting mechanisms are concerned), and I am not really noticing much difference versus 2022 or so. Sure, there's little bits of anubis here or there, and a few sites (which I know for a fact are experiencing targeted DDoS attacks unrelated to AI scraping) having annoying Cloudflare verification screens, but that's about it.

My setup (other than the screen reader) is as vanilla as it gets. Safari, AdGuard for Ad blocking, no VPN except work VPN when necessary, no PiHole, no settings changed. If you're using something more esoteric, maybe try going mainstream and see if that improves your experience.

[–] coke12 3 days ago

What do you mean by “anubis” here?

[–] account42 3 days ago

It's a DRM middleware used to harass users of customized and privacy respecting browsers which is popular with many smaller websites.

[–] Aldqueath 3 days ago

I am not sure what you are doing to get "harassed" by anubis but I use privacy respecting browsers with ad blockers and vpns myself, and anubis is by far the least annoying, almost invisible even.

In comparison I get cloudflare recaptcha on every site that uses it, sometimes multiple times per session and sometimes not even letting me pass at all due to "error".

And if the website uses Google recaptcha then I close the tab because I know it will just end up in endless recaptcha hell.

[–] jacquesm 3 days ago

Google too. 'We are detecting unusual traffic from your address'. I don't know how often I've seen this and there isn't a byte that goes in or out on this connection without monitoring so if it really would be 'unusual' I would hope I would be on it before Google told me, especially not from a session that's been active for days or weeks.

[–] account42 3 days ago

If you need to compare the project to Google and Cloudflare in order to look less bad that's not exactly a good sign.

[–] andrepd 3 days ago

Come on... This thread has people saying their small website went from 1k requests a day to 100 requests per second. What would you have them do to mitigate this, I wonder? I would rather not have to have an anime girl picture stalling the website load for 1s, but I'd rather have the anime girl and see the website than no anime girl and no website.

[–] barbafant 3 days ago

Is that the one that shows an anime figure holding a magnifyig glass while it is checking your browser?

[–] notafox 2 days ago

You can remove the figure - here's uBlock Origin filter to block it from loading:

  ! Title: Hide Anubis Image
  */.within.website/x/cmd/anubis/static/img/*.webp$image

[–] VorpalWay 3 days ago

Yes, and at least in the past it did proof of work to verify that it wasn't a bot. Though apparently that is no longer effective against all bots.

[–] tempfile 3 days ago

Please substantiate this claim. What do you think makes it DRM? What kind of browser are you using that results in "harassment"? I use tor browser and other oddball firefox forks all the time, Anubis never gave me any trouble. I think it just requires you to compute some hashes.

[–] kasey_junk 3 days ago

It’s a software tool that specifically exists to allow content creators to enforce rules about how their content is used. It meets the dictionary definition of DRM.

It’s DRM that I think of as silly larping that doesn’t really bother me, but it’s clearly drm.

[–] tempfile 3 days ago

> It’s a software tool that specifically exists to allow content creators to enforce rules about how their content is used.

This is what I would like substantiated. I can go to a site behind Anubis, download the content on it, and do whatever I want with it. It doesn't do any kind of attestation of hardware or software. So - what makes it DRM?

[–] philipwhiuk 3 days ago

This is such a wild re-imagining of 'preventing uncountable AI crawlers perform DoS attacks on a whim to make line go up'

[–] furst-blumier 3 days ago

Not OP but most likely https://anubis.techaro.lol/

[–] kuschku 3 days ago

https://anubis.techaro.lol/