A significant number of blogs and open source services have begun using Anubis, a Javascript-based proof-of-work challenge, as a CAPTCHA-like that gates access to their websites. This is an attempt to deter AI companies like Meta, Google, OpenAI and Perplexity from repeatedly and mindlessly scraping their websites and consuming a gigantic amount of bandwidth for no real benefit to anyone involved (because these websites update significantly less frequently than the scraping occurs).
When you open a website that uses Anubis, you are faced with a fox-eared anime girl mascot. This is incredibly disorienting and irritating when you are trying to focus on solving some technical problem, and gets annoying fast. The designer of the mascot thinks that the mascot is "disarming" and therefore reassuring to non-technical users who may be faced with it.1 The creator of Anubis claims that the image is there as a "social cost" (on the website administrators).2
You, as an end-user, can easily prevent Anubis from showing its furry fox anime girl mascot to you when the proof-of-work challenge pops up before you can access the website you intended to access. Just install uBlock Origin and add the following to its custom filters list:
# Hide the Anubis (https://anubis.techaro.lol/) mascot
*anubis/static/img/pensive.webp$image
*anubis/static/img/reject.webp$image
*anubis/static/img/happy.webp$image
I found this filter list originally on this HN comment, for context.
Footnotes
↩︎Hey there! The design of the mascot serves a dual-purpose, and was done very intentionally.
Your workflow getting interrupted, especially with a full-screen challenge page, is a very high-stress event. The mascot serves a purpose in being particularly distinct and recognizable, but also disarming for first-time users. This emotional response was calibrated particularly for more non-technical users who would be quick to be worried about 'being hit by a virus'. In particular I find that bot challenges tend to feel very accusing ("PROVE! PROVE YOU ARE NOT A ROBOT!"), and that a little bit of silly would disarm that feeling.
Similarly, that's why the error version of the mascot looks more surprised if anything. After all, only legitimate users will ever see that. (bots don't have eyes, or at least don't particularly care).
– Hey there! The design of the mascot serves a dual-purpose, and was done very …
↩︎There's been some online venom and vitriol about the use of a cartoon that people only see for about 3 seconds on average that make me wonder if I should have made this code open source in the first place. The anime image is load-bearing. It is there as a social cost. You are free to replace it, but I am also free to make parts of the program rely on the presence of the anime image in order to do more elaborate checks, such as checks that do not rely on JavaScript.
– Avoiding becoming the lone dependency peg with load-bearing anime - Xe Iaso