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by gosub100 68 days ago
Maybe we can start a new protocol where the html is encrypted, and the viewer must try 2^10 to 2^20 hashes before the decryption key is discovered. Same formula that BTC mining uses. It would be negligible cost for any single user but terribly expensive for crawling en-masse.
4 comments

Anything that increases the entry time by a second or more is a pretty good way to make me (and probably others) just not bother with opening the website.
Usually the Anubis anti-bot things only take a second. But I stared at one for more than 30 seconds the other day when I tried to access one of the Linux kernel websites. Literally just a progress bar with a hash counter. I was on a modern iPhone, I don’t know why it took so long. maybe because my phone had low battery? But it’s infuriating that this is what the web has become.

The web is becoming more and more unusable every day. If your data is easy to access, it gets stolen and scraped, your site effectively DDOSed. If your site is hard to access nobody will visit.

Just removing a couple of ad scripts would probably get the loading time back where it was.
Better yet, set up a way for users to just pay $0.01 using lightning or some other token to view your site and scrape it.
This is just introducing a small business cost for AI/scrapers and a reason to bail out of the funnel for real users--so by charging, you'll have an even larger percentage of bots.
Or we make a separate, smaller internet for humans with a verified identity.
> with a verified identity

Folks added an optional field to store a broad age category to optionally present to websites to facilitate keeping children out of porn sites, and everyone lost their collective minds.

This is how Anubis operates, to some extent. The more suspicious your connection is, the harder and more frequent the proof of work.

The latency while browsing the web these days is brutal as a result; between Anubis and Cloudflare and the like.

Our prize for it will be the impending super intelligence our benevolent future overlords allow us to exploit, I suppose. /s

Judging by the multiple trivial Anubis bypass browser extensions, Anubis does not operate.