{"slug": "above-privacy-phones-laptops-and-tablets", "title": "Above: Privacy Phones, Laptops, and Tablets", "summary": "A website administrator has deployed a security tool called Anubis that forces visitors to complete a computational proof-of-work challenge before accessing the site. The system is designed to deter AI companies from aggressively scraping website content, which causes server downtime and blocks legitimate users. Anubis serves as a temporary measure while developers work on more advanced browser fingerprinting techniques to distinguish human visitors from automated scrapers.", "body_md": "# Running a private, secure check -- please hold.\n\nLoading...\n\nYou 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.\n\nAnubis 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.\n\nUltimately, 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 work page doesn't need to be presented to users that are much more likely to be legitimate.\n\nPlease note that Anubis requires the use of modern JavaScript features that plugins like JShelter will disable. Please disable JShelter or other such plugins for this domain.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/above-privacy-phones-laptops-and-tablets", "canonical_source": "https://abovephone.com/", "published_at": "2026-06-06 05:37:54+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-06 06:17:00.445981+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-safety", "ai-policy", "ai-research", "ai-infrastructure", "ai-ethics"], "entities": ["Anubis", "Hashcash", "JShelter"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/above-privacy-phones-laptops-and-tablets", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/above-privacy-phones-laptops-and-tablets.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/above-privacy-phones-laptops-and-tablets.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/above-privacy-phones-laptops-and-tablets.jsonld"}}