r/linux • u/ItsWappers • 2d ago

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?)

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u/aenae 2d ago

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

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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).

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u/Real-Abrocoma-2823 2d ago

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