GoKawiil
Tech News
Ancient Egyptian art repeatedly depicts the god Set with the head of an unidentified creature, a figure the Greeks dubbed the 'Typhonic beast' and modern scholars call the 'Set animal.' Unlike other gods such as Horus (falcon) or Anubis (jackal), no real-world species has been matched to Set's depiction despite centuries of study.
The article's page itself was blocked by Anubis, a proof-of-work tool websites deploy to deter aggressive AI scraping bots, illustrating the very problem the piece discusses. Anubis forces browsers to solve a computational puzzle before loading content, adding negligible friction for humans but real cost for mass scrapers.
Anubis, a proof-of-work challenge system designed to block aggressive AI scrapers, has finally shipped a WebAssembly-based version after roughly a year of development. The tool works similarly to Hashcash, forcing browsers to solve a computational puzzle before accessing a website, which is negligible for individual users but costly at scraper scale. Site administrators use it as a stopgap measure while better methods for detecting headless browsers are developed.