What the people who like Anubis don't get is that the cost for honest people is very real, the cost for crawlers is basically $0 because: most of the people who run crawlers are just idiots and aren't paying attention to what's happening and get crap data and don't even know they are getting bounced and probably don't even look at the crap data they collect, the worst of the crawlers are running botnets using stolen CPU, the real AI companies don't have any financial discipline and wouldn't care it if anubis wasted a CPU*hour per page.
Or rather, those "click on the bus" images raise your blood pressure but are close to trivial for a bot to automate... It's all performative... We're good open source people who prove we are good open source people because we put Anubis on our page to shame those bad AI people.
Also, optimized Anubis & other proof of work challenge solvers are much faster than a stock browser.
I don’t like the cloudflare checkbox or click all the buses to access this website but Anubis you just sit there for a split second and do nothing.
That’s what people like about Anubis.
The idea that you’re in desperate need to get information from 5 web pages as quickly as possible like you’re a contestant on The Amazing Race is ridiculous. This is the definition of dramatic.
Anubis finishes up in less time than takes to read this sentence.
- https://docs.sweeting.me/s/ai-scraping-will-force-us-towards...
- https://docs.sweeting.me/s/so-you-want-to-build-a-social-net...
I've worked at multiple AI browser companies at this point and I think the best way forward is to start paying for content again honestly. Brave and BAT were too early but we need more things like that with lower friction and more primitives baked into the browser. The AI bots that create value for people and have money will happily pay to get access to the content, keeping it alive in the process and paying for the maintenance cost of allowing good bots.
DBSC, DPoP, and Google's latest "Google Cloud Fraud Defense" reCAPTCHA using phone are another approach where you use hardware secure enclaves to prevent cookies from leaving devices and attest to 1 visitor = 1 physical device. I don't like these because I want my personal agents to be able to access the things I can on my behalf. If I misbehave then block me & bots, not all bots, this is not as impossible as companies make it sound.
The worst possible approach is to require biometric or government ID, that's the one we all need to push hard against, as it's bad for everyone involved.
IMO a good middle-ground is a "proof of stake", where you just need to prove you're an entity that has some meaningful incentive to follow the rules and be nice, because you'll take some damage if you get banned.
That differs from other options like paying the site money (perverse incentive problem) or proving a relationship to a unique human (privacy dangers) or that you're not a human and not a robot (difficult to test.)
Imagine a vending-machine at city-hall, where anyone spend $5 to a legally-recognized charity of their choice. In exchange, you get some tokens [0] can be loaded into your web browser.
[0] Issues of anonymity and deterring resale are important, but I'm gonna shelve them for the moment in the interests of space/brevity.
Most of the time a web page reports an error or seems to be down, or it gives you another captcha no matter how many times you correctly answer it, it's just denying you access, but it's also trying to hide that from you. Whether there's captchas or an outright denial, those pages are guarded by bots that only allow other bots to proceed to the page. We've known for several years that captchas only deter humans (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2384228-bots-are-better...) so clearly anyone currently using them doesn't want humans visiting the page.
Most of the time, the Gemini summary that Google includes in their search results isn't particularly useful, but extracting data from those bot-only pages is one thing it excels at. So, whenever a search result links to a page guarded by a bot, and it senses that I am a human and denies access, I go back to the Google search results page, and ask Gemini to scrape the page and provide the data I want from it.
Alternatively, I use Firefox with uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger - so it might be that.
Another one on the list now is Amazon adding amazon.com redirects around IMDB pages. I can't even follow IMDB links anymore without getting trapped in broken redirects, because my Amazon cookies are in another session and whatever challenge they are running on amazon.com is bad at completing redirects and keeps redirecting brokenly encoded addresses that are 404 pages instead. I have to search things from IMDB in an Amazon container to get it to take me to the same addresses the direct link should have and used to in any container.
Feels like the whole internet is hitting that hockey stick growth... towards becoming shit.
Because often these reports are from people using weird browsers, privacy plugins, VPNs, javascript off, etc
It does happen to "normal" browsers but are you doing anything that look suspicious?
Whatever magic is built into the CloudFlare checkbox and my motion to click on it, I really wish was just part of the browser and my motion to click on everything else.
This is the internet in 2026 and it sure as hell won't get any better.
Kinda disappointing that this doesn't get daily attention on HN of all places.
Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans [0]
NopeCHA: CAPTCHA Solver [1]
OF COURSE, these are band-aids on an internet under full assault.
P.S. Paywall busters are a nuisance to run through. Often, a paywalled article is syndicated (MSN does this a lot) or available at arxiv, or an author's institution, so "Use the web search, Luke."
The original model for web didn't include REST style API calls.
A new model designed holistically for content distribution, with a hardened standardized spec for the API calls part, something that by design entirely shirks today's daily challenges, is necessary.
_
> Or just come back read the comments on hn for that article.
Same lol
