this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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I get that website admins are desperate for a solution, but Anubis is fundamentally flawed.
It is hostile to the user, because it is very slow on older hardware andere forces you to use javascript.
It is bad for the environment, because it wastes energy on useless computations similar to mining crypto. If more websites start using this, that really adds up.
But most importantly, it won't work in the end. These scraping tech companies have much deeper pockets and can use specialized hardware that is much more efficient at solving these challenges than a normal web browser.
It takes like half a second on my Fairphone 3, and the CPU in this thing is absolute dogshit. I also doubt that the power consumption is particularly significant compared to the overhead of parsing, executing and JIT-compiling the 14MiB of JavaScript frameworks on the actual website.
It depends on the website's setting. I have the same phone and there was one website where it took more than 20 seconds.
The power consumption is significant, because it needs to be. That is the entire point of this design. If it doesn't take significant a significant number of CPU cycles, scrapers will just power through them. This may not be significant for an individual user, but it does add up when this reaches widespread adoption and everyone's devices have to solve those challenges.
The usage of the phone's CPU is usually around 1w, but could jump to 5-6w when boosting to solve a nasty challenge. At 20s per challenge, that's 0.03 watt hours. You need to see a thousand of these challenges to use up 0.03 kwh
My last power bill was around 300 kwh or 10,000 more than what your phone would use on those thousand challenges. Or a million times more than what this 20s challenge would use.