GoKawiil
Tech News
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.
A hobbyist bought two ASRock BC-250 mining cards from AliExpress for £126 and £103 respectively, and successfully unlocked all 40 compute units on both despite AMD's binning meant to disable some cores. One card also unlocked all 8 CPU cores, while the other had one faulty core, but both performed well running the gpt-oss-20b language model via llama.cpp, hitting up to 100 tokens per second at 8K context.