Signing TLS handshakes inside a TPM
A website administrator explains the implementation of 'Anubis,' a Proof-of-Work challenge system designed to deter aggressive AI web scrapers. The system forces automated bots to perform computational tasks, making mass scraping economically unviable.
Why it matters
This highlights the growing tension between website owners and AI companies regarding data scraping and server resource consumption.
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.
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