Christ am I so happy that people like you exist on this website and can actually put into words exactly what my stupid feelings are. GOOD POST

It’ll block elinks/lynx users or a real person using curl. But it’ll also block any bot that doesn’t use a browser, which accounts for most of the volume.

nuh uh

Anubis has a new javascriptless metarefresh which uses HTML to refresh the page after a few seconds. This is a much better solution than the computational proof of work, in my opinion. This line from the docs though is perplexing:

yuh uh!

(I’m just fucking around now I’m too tired lol, it’s 10 pm. But it does work on lynx!!!)

Just want to reiterate, I understand the concerns with Anubis, it’s just that FSF makes me go

I mean, Anubis would do a pretty bad job in their case anyways, and their attitude kind of makes practical sense there. Almost all code fetching tools (from git to ftp to curl) don’t run any external code (and I think we can agree it would be a horrible idea to do so); as such, proof-of-work solutions like Anubis won’t work for code hosting (which is what the article is about).

I don’t really care about whether Anubis would make a good use case for them, the problem is that even if it did they wouldn’t have used it as stated in the post. I get angry and irrational easy when I see bullshit about things that I care about, and that tends to me overlooking actually important parts.

You in particular don’t need to deal with them in any way at all. The code they host is free software and has plenty of other mirrors all over the web. If you want to contribute to any of the projects for which they are hosting upstreams you can almost always just send an email with your patch to authors directly. Save your anger for capitalists.

I’ll keep interacting in a way that points out “hey maybe this isn’t the best course of action” because I will keep caring, even if I hate them. My hate must be pointed out, shown why it exists. Because even if I hate capitalism and capitalists, I hate ineffectual action even more.

It won’t work through patches, if the rot is fundamental. I’ll probably contribute to other projects, Libreboot is now more enticing after Leah cut away from their type of bullshit.

The FSF do give off the trot vibe and thank you for making that connection that I will never unsee. I think if they just posted what I wrote above they would get far less backlash.

And probably less nonsense from me, I tend to get angry and irrational easily (partly because I’m passionate and care) and that leads to me overlooking some important parts.

This is a legitimate critique though. Anubis requires the use of capital W Web Browsers (chromium, Firefox) in order to access the site. This effectively blocks users who A: dont want to run the computations of the JS program (which can’t be circumvented due to the server side computing done) and B: users using web browsers without or with limited JS functionality that wouldn’t meet the reqs of Anubis.

And well yes, I do agree that Anubis basically only help to entrench the big browsers while cutting off people using for example Lynx. Now, I’m writing this after checking their changelog, and they have introduced a challenge that works without client side JS, so I guess we can disregard the concern of entrenching.

Anubis was created as an emergency stop valve on LLM scrapers, but I think having a solution which doesn’t require Anubis is also valuable as well.

And that’s what I understand it’s purpose to be, I don’t want it to be the end all be all. But it’s “good enough” as the dev themself put.

Malware is a terrible choice of words. Anubis isnt malware. It may provoke questions about the state of the Web but there’s nothing malicious about protecting your digital infra when the vast majority of users browse with JS enabled and not doing so would take down your site or leave you with thousands of dollars in upkeep costs.

That’s the biggest issue I have with the FSF, it’s all posturing with no substance. They should absolutely spearhead a project that would be an alternative for what Anubis is currently doing, or I don’t fucking know try and find one to support and endorse?? Their inability to compromise for a limited time is way too annoying.

replied to another user with the same question, I just don’t like the FSF for it’s nonsensical puritatnism

TL;DR: Rant about the FSF as a whole and why they annoy me with their puritanism

The problem I have with the FSF is their stance on this “good enough” solution is, as always, that it cannot be accepted. Their “purity” is pointless as I don’t find it at all useful in furthering free software, while Anubis is doing actual work against mass scraping by AI companies, their choice is to outright disavow it because “it acts like malware”, and performing “useless computation”. And then they have the gall to beg for even more donations when the solution to their DDOS problems is right there. I hate them for being so ineffective at what they’re supposed to be doing. “The same calculations as cryptominers”, fuck off.

It’s so fucking annoying having to deal with their puritanism, especially after I tried their ways of running 100% free software as by their own guidelines! Genuinely I need to do more investigating on this part, but they really do seem like a Trotskyist org to me more and more and I’m glad I’m out of fanboying over them.

You caused this…