4 ms·

I’ve been sitting on this page for two minutes and it’s still not sure whether I’m a bot lol. What did I do in a past life to deserve this :(

mxmlnkn 7mo ago
After 2 minutes at 150 kHashes on mobile, I finally see the first pixel of the progress bar filling up. Seems like it will take hours or a day to finish. Some estimate would have been nice.
- raincole 7mo ago
  At this point I wonder if you can post a crypto miner page on HN and people will fall for it.
- dheera 7mo ago
  I don't get this kHash thing. Do we have captchas mining bitcoin in a distributed fashion for free now?
  - throw10920 7mo ago
    The page says > Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash And if you look up Hashcash on Wikipedia you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash which explains how Hashcash works in a fairly straightforward manner (unlike most math pages).
    - dheera 7mo ago
      Oh fun so now we're effectively draining users' phone and laptop batteries now just to prove that they have batteries and somehow that's a proxy for them being human
      - throw10920 7mo ago
        Given that you're clearly completely ignorant of everything in the anti-spam space, you should probably do some research before making uninformed comments like this.
- drum55 7mo ago
  Ironically I used a LLM to write a bypass for this ridiculous tool, doing hashing in a browser makes no sense, Claude's very bad implementation of it in C does tens of megahash a second and passes all of the challenges nearly instantly. It took about 5 minutes for Claude to write that, and it's not even a particularly fast implementation, but it beats the pants off doing string comparisons for every loop in JavaScript which is what the Anubis tool does. for (; ;) { const hashBuffer = await calculateSHA256(data + nonce); const hashArray = new Uint8Array(hashBuffer); let isValid = true; for (let i = 0; i < requiredZeroBytes; i++) { if (hashArray[i] !== 0) { isValid = false; break; } } It's less proof of work and just annoying to users, and feel good to whoever added it to their site, I can't wait for it to go away. As a bonus, it's based on a misunderstanding of hashcash, because it is only testing zero bytes comparison with a floating point target (as in Bitcoin for example), the difficulty isn't granular enough to make sense, only a couple of the lower ones are reasonably solvable in JavaScript and the gaps between "wait for 90 minutes" and "instantly solved" are 2 values apart.
  - Retr0id 7mo ago
    I wrote one that uses opencl: https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/anubis_offload https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/anubis_offload
    - drum55 7mo ago
      Bravo, you even implemented the midstate speedup from Bitcoin, that's way more impressive.
      - Retr0id 7mo ago
        It's not exactly rocket science heh, just baffling that the original anubis impl left an order-of-magnitude speedup on the table.
  - bawolff 7mo ago
    Shouldnt browser also have it implemented in c? Like i assume crypto.subtle isnt written in js.
luxuryballs 7mo ago
I think we got honeybotted.
prewett 7mo ago
The cynic in me thinks that they’re mining bitcoin on our phones… And after completing, it claimed the page was misconfigured.
coryrc 7mo ago
On what page? https://gladeart.com/blog/the-bot-situation-on-the-internet-is-actually-worse-than-you-could-imagine-heres-why https://gladeart.com/blog/the-bot-situation-on-the-internet-... loaded effectively instantly for me.

mxmlnkn 7mo ago

After 2 minutes at 150 kHashes on mobile, I finally see the first pixel of the progress bar filling up. Seems like it will take hours or a day to finish. Some estimate would have been nice.

raincole 7mo ago
At this point I wonder if you can post a crypto miner page on HN and people will fall for it.
dheera 7mo ago
I don't get this kHash thing. Do we have captchas mining bitcoin in a distributed fashion for free now?
- throw10920 7mo ago
  The page says > Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash And if you look up Hashcash on Wikipedia you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash which explains how Hashcash works in a fairly straightforward manner (unlike most math pages).
  - dheera 7mo ago
    Oh fun so now we're effectively draining users' phone and laptop batteries now just to prove that they have batteries and somehow that's a proxy for them being human
    - throw10920 7mo ago
      Given that you're clearly completely ignorant of everything in the anti-spam space, you should probably do some research before making uninformed comments like this.
drum55 7mo ago
Ironically I used a LLM to write a bypass for this ridiculous tool, doing hashing in a browser makes no sense, Claude's very bad implementation of it in C does tens of megahash a second and passes all of the challenges nearly instantly. It took about 5 minutes for Claude to write that, and it's not even a particularly fast implementation, but it beats the pants off doing string comparisons for every loop in JavaScript which is what the Anubis tool does. for (; ;) { const hashBuffer = await calculateSHA256(data + nonce); const hashArray = new Uint8Array(hashBuffer); let isValid = true; for (let i = 0; i < requiredZeroBytes; i++) { if (hashArray[i] !== 0) { isValid = false; break; } } It's less proof of work and just annoying to users, and feel good to whoever added it to their site, I can't wait for it to go away. As a bonus, it's based on a misunderstanding of hashcash, because it is only testing zero bytes comparison with a floating point target (as in Bitcoin for example), the difficulty isn't granular enough to make sense, only a couple of the lower ones are reasonably solvable in JavaScript and the gaps between "wait for 90 minutes" and "instantly solved" are 2 values apart.
- Retr0id 7mo ago
  I wrote one that uses opencl: https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/anubis_offload https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/anubis_offload
  - drum55 7mo ago
    Bravo, you even implemented the midstate speedup from Bitcoin, that's way more impressive.
    - Retr0id 7mo ago
      It's not exactly rocket science heh, just baffling that the original anubis impl left an order-of-magnitude speedup on the table.
- bawolff 7mo ago
  Shouldnt browser also have it implemented in c? Like i assume crypto.subtle isnt written in js.

luxuryballs 7mo ago

I think we got honeybotted.

prewett 7mo ago

The cynic in me thinks that they’re mining bitcoin on our phones… And after completing, it claimed the page was misconfigured.

coryrc 7mo ago

On what page? https://gladeart.com/blog/the-bot-situation-on-the-internet-is-actually-worse-than-you-could-imagine-heres-why https://gladeart.com/blog/the-bot-situation-on-the-internet-... loaded effectively instantly for me.