Dav2d
The Videolan Dav2d website uses Anubis, a Proof-of-Work system, to prevent AI companies from scraping content and causing server downtime. Anubis challenges visitors with computational tasks to deter large-scale automated access while aiming to distinguish legitimate users over time. JavaScript must be enabled to pass the challenge, as AI firms have disrupted standard website hosting practices.
- ▪Anubis is a Proof-of-Work system designed to protect websites from aggressive AI scraping.
- ▪It uses computational challenges inspired by Hashcash to increase scraping costs at scale.
- ▪JavaScript is required to bypass the Anubis challenge on the Videolan Dav2d site.
- ▪Anubis version 1.25.0 is currently running on the website.
- ▪The system is a temporary measure while better fingerprinting methods are developed.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Making sure you're not a bot! Loading...You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam. The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable, but at mass scraper levels it adds up and makes scraping much more expensive.Ultimately, this is a placeholder solution so that more time can be spent on fingerprinting and identifying headless browsers (EG: via how they do font rendering) so that the challenge proof of…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News: Front Page.