Lesson plan

Anubis (software)

Anubis is an open source software program that adds a proof of work challenge to websites before users can access them in order to deter web scraping. It has been adopted mainly by Git forges and free and open-source software projects. Anubis was created by Xe Iaso in response to Amazon's web crawler overloading their Git server, as the crawler did not respect the robots.txt exclusion protocol and would work around restrictions. Iaso lists Hashcash as having inspired the project. The application supports inspecting request elements such as headers like the User-Agent header to determine if the request should require proof of work. The name Anubis is taken from the Ancient Egyptian god of funerals and judgement, who weighs the hearts of the dead to determine if they are allowed passage into the afterlife, whereas the Anubis software "weighs the soul of incoming HTTP requests".

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Article summary

Anubis is an open source software program that adds a proof of work challenge to websites before users can access them in order to deter web scraping. It has been adopted mainly by Git forges and free and open-source software projects. Anubis was created by Xe Iaso in response to Amazon's web crawler overloading their Git server, as the crawler did not respect the robots.txt exclusion protocol and would work around restrictions. Iaso lists Hashcash as having inspired the project. The application supports inspecting request elements such as headers like the User-Agent header to determine if the request should require proof of work. The name Anubis is taken from the Ancient Egyptian god of funerals and judgement, who weighs the hearts of the dead to determine if they are allowed passage into the afterlife, whereas the Anubis software "weighs the soul of incoming HTTP requests".

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Discussion questions

  1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
  2. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
  3. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.