It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Anubis switched its proof-of-work challenge to the memory-hard argon2id function to block WASM and WebGPU solvers.
Anubis, a proof-of-work (PoW) anti-bot system, took a year to ship a WebAssembly (WASM) version of its challenge solver. The update now uses argon2id, a memory-hard function, instead of a CPU-hard one, aiming to make GPU-accelerated solvers (like those built with CUDA or WebGPU) less effective. The author notes this addresses the route of using AI to generate custom solvers. The post also mentions ongoing work on ahead-of-time challenge renewal via service workers and acknowledged issues with IP-based binding due to IPv6 privacy extensions and device network changes.
What commenters are saying
Commenters are split on the effectiveness and ethics of PoW as anti-bot defense. Some argue the wasted computational cycles are a downside (unlike crypto mining), while others see it as a necessary cost to deter scraping. There's a recurring suggestion for ahead-of-time token systems or using the work for useful purposes (e.g., fuzzing old games). Skeptics point out that well-funded scrapers can still solve argon2id affordably, and that the system may merely inconvenience regular users and low-end devices. Notably, a user mentions existing extensions like pow-buster and anubis_webgpu that already accelerate solving, and another notes argon2id is already GPU-accelerated, undermining the claimed benefit.