- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
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 Combined with comments I read elsewhere about scrapers starting to solve the challenges, I’m afraid Anubis will be outdated soon and we need something else.
It’s not client-side because validation happens on the server side. The content won’t be displayed until and unless the server receives a valid response, and the challenge is formulated in such a way that calculating a valid answer will always take a long time. It can’t be spoofed because the server will know that the answer is bullshit. In my example, the server will know that the prime factors returned by the client are wrong because their product won’t be equal to the original semiprime. Delegating to a sub-process won’t work either, because what’s the parent process supposed to do? Move on to another piece of content that is also protected by Anubis?
The point is to waste the client’s time and thus reduce the number of requests the server has to handle, not to prevent scraping altogether.
@rtxn validation of what?
This is a typical network thing: client asks for resource, server says here’s a challenge, client responds or doesn’t, has the correct response or not, but has the challenge regardless
THEN (and this is the part you don’t seem to understand) the client process has to waste time solving the challenge, which is, by the way, orders of magnitudes lighter on the server than serving the actual meaningful content, or cancel the request. If a new request is sent during that time, it will still have to waste time solving the challenge. The scraper will get through eventually, but the challenge delays the response and reduces the load on the server because while the scrapers are busy computing, it doesn’t have to serve meaningful content to them.
@rtxn all right, that’s all you had to say initially, rather than try convincing me that the network client was out of the loop: it isn’t, that’s the whole point of Anubis