When visiting some sites on Cromite, Fennec, or IronFox on my Android devices, the Anubis challenge fails with the error “invalid response”. I don’t recall if there were any other error messages that came up. This only affects a seemingly random portion of sites using Anubis and does not clear up after refreshing, both immediately and after waiting several hours. It’s never affected Firefox and Librewolf on desktop, however.

Anyone know why it happens, how to avoid it, or what logs I could collect for an issue report on Github?

    • Contramuffin@lemmy.world
      5·
      20 hours ago

      It’s a project that’s designed to discourage AI scraping. The idea is that every time you access a website, your computer must solve a math problem before it can access the website. For a user, this is trivially easy and wouldn’t affect your browsing experience much at all. For a scraper, though, it accesses so many websites so quickly that the time spent doing the math problems starts to add up, and the scraper ends up spending most of the time just doing useless math problems.

      As a side note, a similar protocol was apparently proposed in the past for emails to discourage spam emails. Clearly, it was not adopted