Anubis [LWN.net]

Anubis

Posted Aug 29, 2026 10:34 UTC (Sat) by Bigos (subscriber, #96807)
Parent article: Ryabitsev: Creepy crawlies

Solving Anubis challenges is easy when you are using residential proxies. Just run the JS content on random people's phones.

I think the "cost" that was supposed to deter bot runners is instead being paid by others and is thus basically free for the former...

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Anubis

Posted Aug 29, 2026 12:31 UTC (Sat) by MarcB (subscriber, #101804) [Link]

Residential proxies are a really tricky topic. Generally speaking, scraping is far from the worst those networks are used for. Many of them are used for outright cyber crime. They make my daily work harder, and not in an interesting way.

But so far, US jurisdiction has protected the scraping networks, and the justification even makes sense: without those networks, larger platforms would simply sell access to the information, monopolising the data market even more. Reddit is a prime example of that.
But now, of course, the data scrapers are selling the data. So, if you don't like scrapers, try to block them, but at the same time make things accessible to https://commoncrawl.org/. This might hurt them even more, in the long run.

Anubis

Posted Sep 3, 2026 3:54 UTC (Thu) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]

They do this now with fully headless Google Chrome, from my logs.

The residential proxies load all the CSS, fonts, JS, etc. now as if they were normal visitors, and it is almost impossible to distinguish them by access patterns.

And the CPU cost now sits with the trojaned apps, i.e. on people’s smartphones (mostly).