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A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

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The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers (www.404media.co)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

She told me she’s [...] also thinking about a version that doesn’t require JavaScript, which some privacy-minded disable in their browsers.

As someone who is keenly aware of the privacy and security problems that come with allowing web scripts, I hope she prioritizes this soon. It's really disappointing to find sites that were formerly readable without javascript suddenly inaccessible since adopting Anubis. The more sites that do this, the more people are pushed toward enabling scripts by default, exposing them to a great many trackers and web exploits that would otherwise be blocked.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

There's an option using some very new HTML tag, but it's not the default.

https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/configuration/challenges/metarefresh

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Interesting. Judging by that option's name, it seems to refer to use of the HTML <meta> tag to refresh a page.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/meta/http-equiv

Neither this tag nor using it for refresh is new at all. I don't think I've seen it used to detect bots, though. I wonder what Anubis is doing here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

It's simply checking if the connection is from an actual browser, as a scraper pretending to be one won't actually refresh the page as instructed. It's going to buy some time, but like the rest of Anubis in general, it will only work until the scrapers get modified to work around it.