alt Hacker NewsI'm not moralizing. The sites running Anubis are owned by people who like Anubis and are fully within their rights to run Anubis. I don't care how enthusiastic they are about it. It's their call.
I'm just saying, it's bad computer science.
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You're arguing worst-case, and people running anubis are saying it dramatically helps in their experience, because they're not getting too many of the sorts of bots that people like you and Tavis (correctly) argue are theoretically possible. So the argument that it's "bad CS" falls flat.
A better, perhaps the best, argument is that a worse bot mix might appear tomorrow, so anubis should be used as a runway for a better solution, and not as a solution in itself. If only everyone with a website had the desire (or AI tokens) to implement their own better solution. In some cases even desire or a lot of tokens isn't enough. I mean, you think kernel.org folks haven't put some serious thought into it? And yet, as HN argues about it, there's kernel.org running anubis at difficulty 5.
Which part of computer science is about getting DDoSed by billionaires who are above the law?
I get what you're saying, but I think that in the abstract "here's this thing you can do to cut the annoying traffic down to 1/3rd its previous level" (with the obvious issues to legitimate users of course) feels like a nice thing to have in this current moment!
If you were dealing with a DoS like this and had an option that cut the annoying traffic in half in a fairly deterministic way, that sounds like a decent thing to do operationally in the moment right?