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A website is using a Proof-of-Work challenge called Anubis to prevent aggressive AI scraping of its content. The system requires visitors to perform computational tasks to access the site, which may conflict with certain browser privacy plugins.
Why it matters
This highlights the growing tension between content creators and AI companies regarding automated data scraping and server resource management.
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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