And how do you actually check for working JS in a way that can't be easily spoofed? Hint: PoW is a good way to do that.
Meta refresh is a downgrade in usability for everyone but a tiny minority that has disabled JS.
You are arguing a strawman. Anubis works because because most AI scrapers (currently) don't want to spend extra on running headless chromium, and because it slightly incentivises AI scrapers to correctly identify themselves as such.
Most of the AI scraping is frankly just shoddy code written by careless people that don't want to ddos the independent web, but can't be bothered to actually fix that on their side.
AI scraping is a massive issue for specific types of websites, such as git forges, wikis and to a lesser extend Lemmy etc, that rely on complex database operations that can not be easily cached. Unless you massively overprovision your infrastructure these web-applications come to a grinding halt by constantly maxing out the available CPU power.
The vast majority of the critical commenters here seem to talk from a point of total ignorance about this, or assume operators of such web applications have time for hyperviligance to constantly monitor and manually block AI scrapers (that do their best to circumvent more basic blocks). The realistic options for such operators are right now: Anubis (or similar), Cloudflare or shutting down their servers. Of these Anubis is clearly the least bad option.
I kinda sucks how AI scrapers make websites inaccessible to everyone 🙄
That blog post is fundamentally misunderstanding what Anubis actually does.
No, that is a false comparison. Keeping money in the local economy doesn't mean we have to have our own monopolistic surveillance capitalist big-tech companies.
This is a misreading of the situation, but I guess it makes for a better headline?
The GDPR etc. only came to be due to a specific political constellation where progressive privacy advocates and nationalistic forces formed an uneasy coalition. But now the political balance has shifted and the respondible EU commissioner has also changed.
Basically what we see now is that the nationalistic forces have rejoined with the neo-liberal ones that promise that if the EU just deregulates the sector hard enough there will be EU based big-tech to compete with the US based ones. This is of course total bollocks and an EU based big-tech wouldn't be significantly better than an US or China based one, but it gets the nationalistic fraction's support.
Maybe more taxes to subsidize oil and gas?
Very, cool. But I can't help to notice the very odd placement of the ethernet ports on that router?
Edit: Ah, I see:
They have strategic ones, not tactical ones. Tactical ones are those mini-nukes that stupid people think they can use without it becoming a proper nuclear war real quick. Everyone else (including the French) thinks they are a waste of money.
If you check for GPU (not generally a bad idea) you will have the same people that currently complain about JS, complain about this breaking with their anti-fingerprinting browser addons.
But no, you can't spoof PoW obviously, that's the entire point of it. If you do the calculation in Javascript or not doesn't really matter for it to work.
In the current shape Anubis has zero impact on usability for 99% of the site visitors, not so with meta refresh.