AI and the Courts – A Cautionary Tale
The article discusses the implementation of Anubis, a protective measure against AI companies that scrape websites. Anubis employs a Proof-of-Work scheme to deter mass scraping, making it more expensive for bots to access resources. The article highlights the ongoing challenges in distinguishing between legitimate users and automated scrapers.
- ▪Anubis is designed to protect websites from aggressive AI scraping.
- ▪It uses a Proof-of-Work scheme similar to Hashcash to increase the cost of scraping.
- ▪The solution requires modern JavaScript features, which may be hindered by certain plugins.
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 Bailii.
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