I'm surprised at the effectiveness of simple PoW to stop practically all activit...

gruez · 2026-03-29T17:02:49 1774803769

>I'm surprised at the effectiveness of simple PoW to stop practically all activity.

It's even dumber than that, because by default anubis whitelists the curl user agent.

    curl -H "User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/146.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" "https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/diff/?id=v7.0-rc5&id2=v7.0-rc4&dt=2"
    <!doctype html><html lang="en"><head><title>Making sure you&#39;re not a bot!</title><link rel="stylesheet"

vs

    curl "https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/diff/?id=v7.0-rc5&id2=v7.0-rc4&dt=2"
    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html lang='en'>
    <head>
    <title>kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git - Linux kernel source tree</title>

functionmouse · 2026-03-29T17:15:48 1774804548

shhhh don't tell the bots !

marginalia_nu · 2026-03-29T17:15:58 1774804558

Anubis' white lists and block rules are configurable though. The defaults are a bit silly.

xena · 2026-03-29T17:40:44 1774806044

The default is to allow non-Mozilla user agents so that existing (good) automation continues to work and so that people stopped threatening to burn my house down. Lovely people in the privacy community.

otterley · 2026-03-29T21:42:44 1774820564

Sorry xe :(

wolvoleo · 2026-03-29T17:13:39 1774804419

It's definitely more than enough to stop me as a human wanting to visit the site, so yeah.

In that case a better solution would be to take the site down altogether.

xboxnolifes · 2026-03-29T17:42:03 1774806123

Take down the site entirely because a couple humans get into a fit about it?

jlarocco · 2026-03-29T18:07:12 1774807632

The site's down entirely anyway. The silly "proof of work" finishes only to tell me the site is down.

What a waste of time.

wolvoleo · 2026-03-29T18:33:04 1774809184

I'm just saying, making visitors wait at least a minute while making their device turn red hot is going to stop 99,9% of your visitors. So at that point what's the point in trying to serve the content?