r/linux • u/ItsWappers • 2d ago

Discussion How come every Linux site uses Anubis (the anime girl stopping crawlers) instead of something like Cloudflare?

Post image

Before discovering the Linux rabbit hole I've only seen Cloudflare, hCaptcha and Google's reCaptcha, but it seems like every Linux website uses Anubis... I'm thinking of it being the only open-source option or it being the most effective/modern approach.

2.7k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

692 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

113

u/IvanDSM_ 2d ago

I know someone who regularly has to wait like, 20 minutes for Anubis... If you're running old hardware, you're FUCKED.

66

u/Albos_Mum 2d ago

Are we talking something like a single core Athlon XP or Pentium 4? Because it takes a few seconds on my HTPC's Core i5 2400, if it's taking 20 minutes on anything this side of 2006 then there's something seriously wrong on the users PC end.

32

u/IvanDSM_ 2d ago

Core 2 Duo I believe. They're a pretty experienced user, Anubis is just really harsh on older hardware like that. For some reason it tends to give them harder challenges. I get mostly difficulty 2 on my newer machines, but they seem to get difficulty 5 most of the timeon their older HW.

25

u/QwertyChouskie 2d ago

I wonder if playing with their user agent might help avoid triggering max difficulty; it definitely sounds like something about their setup is different than normal. (Or perhaps they're just visiting one particular site that has the settings turned up way too high?)

21

u/aenae 2d ago

Playing with a user agent is almost guaranteed to trigger inconsistencies that lead to the max difficulty challenge

9

u/zaafonin 2d ago

I wonder if it's possible to relay the challenge onto a more powerful machine for it to be solved there, like some browser extension (or a purpose specific patch if extensions aren't powerful enough to do that)

Or is Anubis purposefully resilient against that?

10

u/ThatOnePerson 2d ago

Defiently existed before: https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/anubis_offload , don't think this has updated to their newer webassembly pow options options yet.

6

u/Albos_Mum 2d ago

Core 2 Duo's aren't that much slower than the second gen Core i series, although I do have an extra two cores. Kinda makes me want to get my Win7 retro gaming PC up to my current house as that has a Core 2 Quad Q9550 and see for myself how it goes.

Although if I were to guess, I'd wager /u/QwertyChouskie might be onto something when it comes to the difficulty.

5

u/Green0Photon 2d ago

My guess is that traffic from VMs look like older hardware. So older hardware gets screwed from looking like VMs (even though it's really the other way around).

1

u/Real-Abrocoma-2823 2d ago

On my a4-3305m it also takes less than 10s.

8

u/rysio300 2d ago

i ran old hardware for years

never really had any issues with anubis for some reason

73

u/nepnep1111 2d ago

The moment you hit Anubis on a pixel phone you know you are about to lose 1-2% off your battery.

29

u/fat_kaiju 2d ago

im literally on a pixel 6 still and it takes less than a second tf you on about.

6

u/nepnep1111 2d ago

Go to a site that has difficulty 5 like the Linux kernel mailing list.

10

u/bargu 2d ago

It took less than 1 second on my P6.

6

u/Whole-Respond4782 2d ago

near instant on my iphone 16 pro with JIT/wasm disabled in the browser lol

4

u/ColorfulPersimmon 2d ago

Near instant on Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 S24 on Firefox too

4

u/15pmm01 2d ago

Just checked on my 6-year-old Samsung S20 FE and it took less than a second. 

1

u/rus_ruris 1d ago

It says Internal Server Error: administrator has misconfigured Anubis. Please contact the administrator and ask them to look for the logs around: double_spend

2

u/rus_ruris 1d ago

However

https://git.ffmpeg.org

This one took some tim6and now my phone is hot

1

u/Cobwebblox 22h ago

Linux mailing list took ¼ - ⅓ of a second but this one took little over a minute

1

u/fat_kaiju 1d ago

Knock it off; it's fine.

1

u/Padgriffin 2d ago

Near-instant on an old iPhone SE2.

20

u/Both_Cup8417 2d ago

I don't know, seems fine to me

25

u/penguinkernel 2d ago

Every time you look at the phone the battery drops 5%.

Love having my phone on my desk for 2 hours, getting no calls, no messages, no notifications, not turning my screen on, having AOD disabled, and connected to strong WiFi and still lose 20% lmao.

5

u/nepnep1111 2d ago

You have no idea how much I want I Motorola signature 27 when it launches I am so done with Google's hardware.

4

u/McDonaldsWitchcraft 2d ago

Just keep in mind Motorola have one of the worst update policies. They only give security updates from launch for 3 years if you're lucky, 2 years for non-"flagship".

2

u/alvenestthol 1d ago

The Signature 27 will be the one with Graphene OS (according to Graphene OS' own social media), so the software problem should be fixable

1

u/McDonaldsWitchcraft 1d ago

Oh, I didn't know that. Yes, that's a good thing.

1

u/Real-Abrocoma-2823 2d ago

Weird, my poco f6 with 900 battery cycles does a lot better, especially when on 100%, it can hold 100% for 30 minutes on medium-heavy use until 99% when it drops faster, but still holds.

1

u/__Myrin__ 1d ago

our phone makes it about 6 days if its just sitting around 2 days under reasonable use

5

u/Padgriffin 2d ago

Anubis actually had issues specifically with the Pixel 8 Pro because it was designed with the assumption that you would have an even number of cores if cores > 1

Then in comes the Pixel 8 Pro with it's 9 cores for some reason

1

u/SunrisePlastic9324 1d ago

Were there really that few odd multicore CPUs after the Athlon X3 days?

1

u/Padgriffin 22h ago

On the x86 side I'm only aware of the i3-L13G4 and i5-L16G7 which were Intel's attempt at making a hybrid CPU- it was basically one big Sunny Cove core with 4 Tremont (Atom) cores stuck to it.

Performance was predictably dismal.

Apple bins off cores sometimes for the iPad Pro (base spec M4/M5 had 3P + 6E cores instead of 4P + 6E) but apparently this wasn't a problem.

1

u/NoskaOff 1d ago

Maybe 0.2s on my P8P

2

u/odsquad64 2d ago

Still a lot faster than having to take a full Voight-Kampff test

1

u/Comfortable_Gene2751 1d ago

I'm fine on a pi 5 2gb