It is called Anubis. It doesn’t require some complicated CAPTCHA, nor does it cost literally any amount of money. It’s open source and available on GitHub.
Now, the interesting part about this skimming circumventer is how it works. In fact, it doesn’t do any of that stuff that the typical anti-bot website addon requires, such as asking the user to do some annoying test of vision that also secretly tracks clicks and mouse movement (or taps if it detects the connected client is a mobile device via the User Agent sent by the browser) to decide whether or not you’re a bot. It’s actually really simple.
Instead, it just does some math. Not math as in stuff that watches your every move and calculates some garbage. Hell, I’m pretty sure it lets the skimmers right in without doing some block or whatever. It just does some really complicated math with some really big numbers, and the math usually varies each time you visit. See, for normal users, this isn’t a problem. Maybe just an extra half a second or two of the page loading—no big problem. But when you’re running a big database with tons of computers skimming every page on a site, the extra money that costs piles up, and quick. Especially if your site has over a hundred pages and tons more links that lead to repetition.
This usually deters the person managing the skimmers or AI from, well, skimming your site, often trying to steer away from it instead. That means your work (probably) won’t be used as often by people putting together AIs or large masses of data! Even better, you can give a big middle finger to search engines like Google and Bing that really aren’t that good! Anyways, if you want to see more tech alerts and cool news like this, remember to tune in to the CheeseBlog for another post. Cya!
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