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[ARTICLE · art-26947] src=blog.digitalgrease.dev ↗ pub= topic=ai-ethics verified=true sentiment=· neutral

Can't Stop the Signal. Poison It

A website administrator deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work system, to block AI companies from aggressively scraping the site, which was causing downtime. The system imposes computational costs on mass scrapers while minimally affecting individual users, serving as a temporary measure until better headless browser detection is implemented.

read1 min publishedJun 14, 2026

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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 work page doesn't need to be presented to users that are much more likely to be legitimate.

Please 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.

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