#Tip of the day (and something I just developed and tested some minutes ago): you can hide the anime-esque "catgirl" picture of "Anubis" (as in that open-source project that acts as a "Man-in-the-middle" (more like "Catgirl-in-the-middle") against DDoS and crawling activities by using the same mechanisms behind cryptojacking) using the following uBO (uBlock Origin) filter (possibly compatible with other adblockers as well, such as ABP):
/.*/##img:matches-attr(src=/(happy|pensive|rejected)/)
In a nutshell:
/.*/
matches all domains (because "Anubis" can be lurking behind any domain),
##img:matches-attr()
matches image (
<img>
) elements which matches a specific attribute, which is
src
, to be compared against a RegExp expression,
/(happy|pensive|rejected)/
, which contains all possible image filenames for Anubis's states ("happy", "pensive" and "rejected").
Possible caveats:
- It will match any image whose URL contains one of the words "happy", "pensive" or "rejected", not just Anubis.
- If there are modified versions of Anubis, they may have different image naming, which won't be matched and filtered properly.
Why?
Well, it's just a matter of taste. I'm personally not interested in seeing any anime while I'm browsing websites, let alone anime art injected as another MitM. I have nothing against anime and/or those who like anime, I just don't like anime for myself.
Also, I haven't much against the Anubis project, except for it behaving like another CloudFlare / Google ReCaptcha but being open-source and having a "cute anime girl" aesthetics doing "computations" and heating my poorly-cooled decade-old laptop CPU, although I perfectly understand its purpose (blocking AI crawlers and other botnet crawlers, a blocking of which is understandable and necessary to instruct hyperscalers (Google, OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Alibaba/Qwen, DeepSeek, etc) to respect the damn robots.txt
. Anubis, just do the cryptojac... I mean... the "Proof-of-work computations". There's already text stating whether the request was approved, rejected or undergoing evaluation, so there's no need for any images... Yeah, I'm boring.
Recommended reading: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/our-small-team-vs-millions-of-bots
Tags: #code #snippets #ubo #ublockorigin #filters #anubis #mitm #captcha #freesoftwarefoundation #crawlers #catgirl #anime