Recently I’ve been seeing injected into various Gnome GitLab pages the image of an anime girl and something about Anubis. Pretty wild.
Is this some sort of ongoing attack on the site? I also observe slower loading overall and failed loading of various GitLab components lately.
My girlfriend is gonna be mighty upset is she thinks I’m into that kinda thing.
If this is in any way legit, please change the image to something Gnome-related and/or trustworthy.
Thanks!
Anubis is a reverse proxy that uses proof-of-work challenge to block potential AI scrapers from hitting GNOME GitLab, which have caused significant downtime in the past.
I think customizing the Anubis page for GNOME might be an idea worth exploring.
Phew. Thank you. I had searched prior to posting for both “anubis” and “anubis from within” and came up with empty relevant results.
So GNOME doesn’t have control of what is displayed, meaning it’s done by Anibus? The anime girl is a ridiculous choice for many reasons, and I would very much like to see it changed or removed (there’s really no reason for an image at all). Customizing for GNOME would be a good move I think.
If we are throwing around personal opinions about the Anubis design:
I have no issue with it. Its just a nice way to display the status of a check, not just a generic icon or text.
Though I can understand if its customized to look more like GNOME or more generic.
Please don’t change the image. I want to see an anime girl when I access Gnome Gitlab.
My girlfriend also wants me to see her.
FWIW, the developers of Anubis kindly ask for financial compensation for running instances of Anubis with the character removed.
I too was somewhat ‘concerned’ the first time I saw GitLab do this, and whilst I do agree with the various suggestions that we could this it as an opportunity to remind people of parts of the HIG, or otherwise something generally GNOME-y, I really can’t say I understand the sentiment of ‘the anime girl is a ridiculous choice for many reasons’?
Of more ‘concern’ I’d say is the unclear copyright situation around it being an ‘AI’ image (it it really MIT-compliant? compatible with our values?), not to mention the irony of using ‘anti-LLM’ software from someone involved with LLM ‘tech’, and I can’t say this statement wildly promotes confidence.
But that the image is anime-esque girl-ish? I really cannot see how that is an issue.
My only concern here is if deploying Anubis could affect indexation in traditional search engines like DuckDuckGo or Google. It would make more difficult to find information on reported issues or code examples, even though there is a search engine here in discourse.gnome.org and another one in gitlab.gnome.org.
However, I think I’m answering my own question because I’ve made a test with the Googlebot user agent and my request bypassed Anubis. Am I correct here?
(Sidenote: setting the user agent to something that does not include the word “Mozilla” also bypasses Anubis, but I suppose that commercial LLMs are not going to spoof their user agents like that… right?)
Folks, unless you have a proposal (and a budget) for replacing Anubis with a CDN with protection against hostile web scrapers, all these arguments are pointless bikeshed.
Also: if you’re intimidated or put off by a drawing that appears, on average, for less than 5 seconds, I strongly recommend you turn off your computer and go outside for a while.
I am unable to access the bug tracker since today. That is absolutely inappropriate.
Consider adding ||/*/anubis/static/img/* to your uBlock filters then 
What is the reasoning behind this? I understand requiring attribution (altho the developer should’ve probably used AGPL instead of MIT, as the AGPL requires attribution when modified), but I don’t understand why the anime girl has to stay.
Its seems it skips the challenge if you use anything that isn’t a browser user-agent (curl/lynx/…), which I guess works as all the generic web scraper bots pretend to be a browser.
If a site is really too “serious” for the illustration to be displayed (i.e. a business site), it’s very likely that its owner has the means to contribute financially to the development of Anubis anyways, so this seems like a reasonable place to draw the line to me. Based on the wording on the linked page, it doesn’t seem like they have any interest in enforcing this legally, though, which I guess explains the licensing choice.
Are you using a web browser forked from an older version of Chrome/Chromium? Are you using a custom user agent string that matches an older version of Chromium? Those are usually the cases that trip up the AI scraping blocks.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to at least ask that the character be removed, even if Anubis is still being used.
I don’t think people see it as intimidating, but rather as weird and unprofessional.
Or to put it another way: Usecase for anime girls on a technical website?
Amazon, yes the amazon, has a dog on their 404 page.
I think we should give nerds their little bit of fun.
If I understand it correctly (it’s not impossible I don’t), the illustration is more or less their branding/logo/mascot. It’s basically a non-intrusive advert for Anubis that helps to spread awareness of something like that existing. It also doubles as a status indicator.
And I don’t see any issue with it, since Cloudflare for example also slaps their logo and text “Performance & security by Cloudflare” on their “Checking if the site connection is secure” page. (Yes, it’s smaller, but still.) Non-intrusive promoting of themselves, especially when giving the project for free, is imo acceptable.
And it also really doesn’t matter. Vast majority of site visitors won’t condemn the whole project for being unprofessional just because its website uses a scraper protection that has anime girl as a mascot.
Related:
Your and others’ requests come across as childish. “The little anime girl is unprofessional and not trustworthy.” How is the Anubis character unprofessional? Many brandings use characters to make a service memorable/recognizable.
Sure, it would make more sense to change it to something related to GNOME but also understand that the service’s developer asks end-users not to remove the Anubis character. The least that can be done is respect such a request, especially if the service is free.
Additionally, I’m unsure if you’re being serious, but having a problem with the little character because you’re worried your “girlfriend is gonna be mighty upset [if] she thinks [your] into that kinda thing” is not a valid reason to request it be changed.
I totally get where you’re coming from… there’s definitely a fine line between fun personalization and keeping things professional, especially in a development environment like GitLab. Personally, I think it’s great to have some light-hearted elements, but I can also see how it might be off-putting for some people.
At the end of the day, GitLab is a tool for collaboration and open-source development, so it’s probably best if we keep the focus on that. If someone wants to express themselves through their profile or user interface, that’s cool, but it might be worth considering the context and audience too.
Definitely a good conversation to have, though!
