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?
What’s Anubis?
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
A cute
foxgirljackal girl which protects a website from LLM scrapersA jackal girl, I assume? Anubis (the god) is associated with jackals
Oops, messed up my Egyptology. Thanks!
Is your user agent set to a generic Mozilla? Some have harder challenges for certain user agents too.
Looks like the usual Mozilla/5.0 user agent string. On the note of harder challenges, I have run into instances that set the difficulty to 10, which effectively makes the site inaccessible on mobile and desktop.
No, never had that problem.
Is this on a custom Android distro?
Yes: GrapheneOS and LeOS GSI
I had a similar experience with Cloudflare, for a period of time my Ironfox browser failed the challenge on one or two websites. I don’t remember if it happened with Anubis, I fear there are too many variables (e.g. extensions installed) so I’d like to know how to get helpful logs.
Interesting. The only extensions I have on my mobile browsers are adblockers (uBlock for IronFox and Cromite’s inbuilt adblocker)
