Year of Work Goes Into WebAssembly Support for Anubis Checkpoint

A post titled “It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis” points to a system many website owners now use to keep bots off their servers.

Anubis is a checkpoint that sits in front of a website. It asks visiting browsers to prove they are not a bot before letting them through. The project explains that it exists because the people running a website have set up Anubis to guard the server against AI companies that scrape websites.

Why Websites Need It

According to the project, this kind of scraping causes real harm. The project says it can and does cause the servers to stop working properly, which cuts off the website’s resources for all who try to reach them.

Anubis works by giving people a small task to solve, based on Hashcash, a scheme first proposed for cutting down email spam. The logic runs like this:

1. A single legitimate person solving the task pays almost nothing in time or effort.
2. A mass scraper trying to reach many pages must solve the task every time.
3. That added cost, shared out across a large scraping operation, makes scraping much more costly to run.

The project calls this a Proof-of-Work scheme, the same idea behind Hashcash.

A Temporary Solution

Anubis’s makers say plainly that this is not meant to be the final answer. The project describes the current setup as a temporary solution, so that more time can be spent studying how automated browsers differ from real ones — for example, by how they render text.

The aim, per the project, is to eventually stop showing the challenge to people who are much more likely to be legitimate.

That framing matters. The current checkpoint is meant as a step along the way, not the lasting design the project is building toward.

The WebAssembly Timeline

One detail stands out: it took a year to ship WebAssembly support in Anubis. The source material given does not lay out what particular technical problems caused that period of delay, so it is not known from the project’s own notes what made the work take that long.

The project also notes something tied to how Anubis runs in the browser. Anubis calls for the use of modern JavaScript features, according to the project.

A Note About JShelter

Anubis names one plugin directly. The project warns that plugins like JShelter will turn off the modern JavaScript features that Anubis calls for.

The fix offered by the project is simple. It asks people to turn off JShelter or similar plugins for the website in question.

That means people who use such plugins may need to ease certain settings just to get past the checkpoint.

For most people, Anubis shows up as a brief pause with a message about proof-of-work checking before a page opens. It marks a much larger, mostly quiet struggle between website owners and automated scraping traffic.

The project’s own words, that this is a temporary solution while more time is spent studying how automated browsers can be told apart from real ones, suggest more change lies ahead.

For now, website owners get a working, if unfinished, form of protection against scraping. People who visit these sites get an extra pause, and in the case of JShelter users, a plugin they may need to switch off.

Source: anubis.techaro.lol

Anubis · bot protection · JShelter · proof-of-work · web scraping · WebAssembly