Some thoughts on how useful Anubis really is. Combined with comments I read elsewhere about scrapers starting to solve the challenges, I’m afraid Anubis will be outdated soon and we need something else.
Some thoughts on how useful Anubis really is. Combined with comments I read elsewhere about scrapers starting to solve the challenges, I’m afraid Anubis will be outdated soon and we need something else.
You’re given the challenge to solve by the server, yes. But just because the challenge is provided to you, that doesn’t mean you can fake your way through it.
You still have to calculate the answer before you can get any farther. You can’t bullshit/spoof your way through the math problem to bypass it, because your correct answer is required to proceed.
Unless the server gives you a well-known problem you have the answer to/is easily calculated, or you find a vulnerability in something like Anubis to make it accept a wrong answer, not really. You’re stuck at the interstitial page with a math prompt until you solve it.
Unless I’m misunderstanding your position, I’m not sure what the disconnect is. The original question was about spoofing the challenge client side, but you can’t really spoof the answer to a complicated math problem unless there’s an issue with the server side validation.
@Passerby6497 my stance is that the LLM might recognize that the best way to solve the problem is to run chromium and get the answer from there, then pass it on?
That solution still introduces lots of friction. At the volume and rate that these bots want to be traversing the internet, they probably don’t want to be fully graphically rendering pages and spawning extra browser processes then doing text recognition to then pass on to the LLM training sets. Maybe I’m wrong there, but I don’t think it’s that simple and actually just shifts solving the math challenge horizontally (i.e., in both cases, the scraper or the network the scraper is running on still has to solve the challenge)
Congrats on doing it the way the website owner wants! You’re now into the content, and you had to waste seconds of processing power to do so (effectively being throttled by the owner), so everyone is happy. You can’t overload the site, but you can still get there after a short wait.
@Passerby6497 yes I’ve been told as much 😅
https://lemmy.world/comment/18919678
Jokes aside, I understand this was the point. I just wanted to make the point that it is feasible, if not currently economically viable
Anubis has worked if that’s happening. The point is to make it computationally expensive to access a webpage, because that’s a natural rate limiter. It kinda sounds like it needs to be made more computationally expensive, however.
LLMs can’t just run chromium unless they’re tool aware and have an agent running alongside them to facilitate tool use. I highly suspect that AI web crawlers aren’t that sophisticated.