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.
