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wongarsu • yesterday at 4:32 PM • 5 replies • view on HN

Isn't the issue here the three order of magnitude difference between the (presumably optimized) JS implementation and the optimized C kernel on your browser? If the two stay within an order of magnitude of each other Anubis is a perfectly viable and scalable solution. Bots want to open many orders of magnitude more pages than a normal user, so the resource investment for each single page matters a lot more to them

For reference, the challenge on lists.ffmpeg.org takes 8 seconds on Firefox on my three year old laptop CPU that has worse benchmark scores than the iPhone 17 (tbf, the laptop also cost less than an iPhone 17). 8 seconds doesn't run against thermal limitations, so I really don't see why Safari on a modern iPhone should be so slow at this

Replies

semiquaver • yesterday at 4:40 PM

  >  I really don't see why Safari on a modern iPhone should be so slow at this
me neither, but I don't think it changes the argument. There's always going to be someone on a low-end device. Your adversaries already have superhuman coding ability and infinite patience. Why would you expect the long-term advantage to be with the defenders?
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embedding-shape • yesterday at 9:13 PM

> which takes ~180sec for my iPhone 17 to solve at ~100KH/s

> so I really don't see why Safari on a modern iPhone should be so slow at this

FWIW, my iPhone 12 Mini also does ~110KH/s with Anubis on lists.ffmpeg.org, so seems fairly likely that Safari somehow here isn't working as expected.

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Aurornis • yesterday at 6:03 PM

> Bots want to open many orders of magnitude more pages than a normal user, so the resource investment for each single page matters a lot more to them

Depending on the configuration, Anubis will supply a token after the challenge that bypasses the challenge for a time.

So any scraper that retains basic cookies will be able to bypass the challenge for a number of page views.

A user who needs to load a single page and a bot that wants to scrape a number of pages may pay the same cost.

The amortized per-view cost is highest for the real user.

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reitzensteinm • yesterday at 10:29 PM

Paying a second of CPU time is an inconvenience to a user but trivial for LLM scraping.

The GPU cost to pretrain on that page once will dwarf by 2-3 OOMs the CPU cost to compute Anubis, scrape and post process it. And you’re not going to just train on it once!

At best you’re creating a speed bump for wannabe players scraping with no real plan. The folks training models people use just do not care.

fc417fc802 • today at 2:26 AM

> If the two stay within an order of magnitude of each other Anubis is a perfectly viable and scalable solution.

Exactly, and that's even before accounting for more sophisticated PoW algorithms such as the one used by XMR that almost entirely eliminate any benefit from offloading to an accelerator.