this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

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Just a thought - if you design a system to prevent AI crawlers, instead of booting them off, serve crypto-mining JavaScript instead. It would be very funny.

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[–] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 19 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Isn't that what Anubis was doing? Making it run code so it wasn't worthwhile, but people adjusted AI crawlers to run code?

[–] plz1@lemmy.world 11 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

"Proof of work". The AI crawlers don't run Javascript (yet, I don't think), so it's basically a firewall to them.

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 10 points 3 weeks ago

I'm fairly sure Anubis was made because some crawlers did run JavaScript

[–] Little8Lost@lemmy.world 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Some can from what i understood
And not only JS but other code too like SQL
I remember the somewhat recent case where someone vibecoded something and the AI viped the database

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 8 points 3 weeks ago

That's a local AI agent not an online crawler

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

There's a functional difference between forcing a crawler to interact with code on your server that wastes its time, and getting it to download your code and run it on its own server - the issue being where the actual CPU/GPU/APU cycles happen. If they happen on your server then it's not benefiting you at all, it's costing you the same amount as just running the cryptominer directly would.

Any halfway intelligent administrator would never allow an automated routine to download and run arbitrary code on their own system, it would be a massive security risk.

My understanding of Anubis is that it just leads the crawler into a never-ending cycle of URLs that just lead to more URLs while containing no information of any value. The code that does this is still installed and running on your server, and is just serving bogus links to the crawler.

[–] lagoon8622@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 weeks ago

My understanding of Anubis is that it just leads the crawler into a never-ending cycle of URLs

That's not how Anubis works. You're likely thinking of Nepenthes

[–] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 weeks ago

"would never allow an automated routine to download arbitraru code" javascript and wasm being the leading tech to do exactly this. Make those essential for loading content and bypassing it would have to be bespoke solutions depending on the framework and implementations.