As others point out, the anime girl must exist because otherwise the sites can’t afford to serve you, amidst a new pattern of DDoS that is attributed to AI but I see as just DDoS becoming more prevalent (remember how sites used to occasionally be taken down by DDoS? Before Cloudflare (and Anubis) they’d just have to stay offline until the DDoSers got bored of wasting money for no good reason. Today’s “scrapers” apparently have new reasons that make them never bored of wasting money, but cannot be good enough to justify the aggressiveness that makes them DDoSers).

Hence why my solution is, ironically, micropayments. That would be so cheap that any human could even access thousands of webpages per day for pennies (or however expensive sending a signal across wires is…it can’t be much), including shared dumps of scraped data from billions of pages.

When I opened the article above I was asked to subscribe to a newsletter. I dont know whether to laugh or cry.

And Anubis: it is uncomfortably close to erotica, in a way that makes me panic when it pops up while I'm at the office. I wouldn't care if it was a picture of a puppy or something, but not an anime catgirl.

You seem quite incensed by the anime girl of Anubis. Unfortunately for you it is here to stay for a while, along with cloudflair's implementation and others, as they do reportedly make a difference to the sites using them as shields. Until something better is found, the other option is that the resources otherwise serving more bot traffic than they can afford simply go dark which would be worse.

Equating bot prevention measures with “please give us permission for 1,000s of companies to stalk you around the Internet, no? Here are some dark patterns to try make you accidentally agree” is rather unfair IMO. They are an inconvenience but for the protection of the sites rather than for the betterment-of-adtech-via-conning-you-the-viewer-with-malicious-compliance.

> Bots can use async or virtual threads and not even have to hold on to a stack while they are waiting for this bullshit

They could, but given these methods seem to work currently most (almost all?) are not. They will start doing so if the amount of resources protected in this way increases to the point where it is worth it, or course, that is why memory-hard processes are being worked on which will make that route less practical.

> cookie banners, and of the that crap should be an automatic F grade on WCAG and should make web sites immediately liable for ADA lawsuits

I can't disagree there, though that would be quite an inefficient process and requires a bunch of money up front from who-ever champions the legal challenge, so I doubt it would actually be at all practical.

What's the alternative? Invisible algorithmic fuzzy recognition on the server side that just randomly bans you if you look like a bad bot, with no recourse? At least if you solve a captcha and dismiss the cookie banner you can access the website.

> Bots can use async or virtual threads and not even have to hold on to a stack while they are waiting for this bullshit, clicking on buses, etc.

Don't the bots still need to do the proof of work for Anubis? They can't "async" their way out of that work.

> Another web is possible but web populists don't really believe it.

How? Sharing knowledge with the world used to be an obviously good thing. Now it's a way to help tech companies replace people with machines. What alternative web could change this state of things?

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