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Anubis Works

(xeiaso.net)
313 points evacchi | 1 comments | 12 Apr 25 22:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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cookiengineer ◴[13 Apr 25 02:35 UTC] No.43669587[source]▶
I am currently building a prototype of what I call the "enigma webfont" where I want to implement user sessions with custom seeds / rotations for a served and cached webfont.

The goal is to make web scraping unfeasible because of computational costs for OCR. It's a cat and mouse game right now and I want to change the odds a little. The HTML source would be effectively void without the user session, meaning an OTP like behavior could also make web pages unreadable once the assets go uncached.

This would allow to effectively create a captcha that would modify the local seed window until the user can read a specified word. "Move the slider until you can read the word Foxtrott", for example.

I sure would love to hear your input, Xe. Maybe we can combine our efforts?

My tech stack is go, though, because it was the only language where I could easily change the webfont files directly without issues.

replies(2): >>43669695 #>>43670983 #
1. rollcat ◴[13 Apr 25 08:04 UTC] No.43670983[source]▶
The problem isn't as much that the websites are scraped (search engines have been doing this for over three decades), it's the request volume that brings the infrastructure down and/or costs up.

I don't think mangling the text would help you, they will just hit you anyway. The traffic patterns seem to indicate that whoever programmed these bots, just... <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulIOrQasR18>

> I sure would love to hear your input, Xe. Maybe we can combine our efforts?

From what I've gathered, they need help in making this project more sustainable for the near and far future, not to add more features. Anubis seems to be doing an excellent job already.