A thought on JavaScript "proof of work" anti-scraper systems

One of the things that people are increasingly using these days to deal with the issue of aggressive LLM and other web scrapers is JavaScript based "proof of work" systems, where your web server requires visiting clients to run some JavaScript to solve a challenge; one such system (increasingly widely used) is Xe Iaso's Anubis. One of the things that people say about these systems is that LLM scrapers will just start spending the CPU time to run this challenge JavaScript, and LLM scrapers may well have lots of CPU time available through means such as compromised machines. One of my thoughts is that things are not quite as simple for the LLM scrapers as they look. An LLM scraper is operating in a hostile environment (although its operator may not realize this). In a hostile environment, dealing with JavaScript proof of work systems is not as simple as simply running it, because you can't particularly tell a JavaScript proof of work system from JavaScript that does other things. Letting ... Read full article.