Anti-Bot Challenge Page Blocking Access to Legal Case 2026IEHC216
Summary
BAILII Ireland has deployed an anti-bot protection mechanism (Anubis) on its legal case database. The system uses a proof-of-work challenge based on Hashcash principles to deter AI web scrapers. Users encountering the page must disable JavaScript-blocking extensions like JShelter to proceed. The page serves as a placeholder while more sophisticated headless browser detection is developed.
What changed
BAILII Ireland has implemented an anti-bot protection system called Anubis on its legal case database. The system presents a proof-of-work challenge page to visitors, using computational requirements inspired by Hashcash email spam mitigation to make mass scraping by AI companies more expensive and resource-intensive. The page notes this is a temporary solution while more sophisticated fingerprinting techniques for identifying headless browsers are developed.
For legal researchers, academics, and professionals seeking access to Irish case law through BAILII, the page requires modern JavaScript execution and may necessitate disabling privacy or security plugins. This represents a technical access barrier rather than a substantive legal or regulatory change affecting the rights or obligations of parties to legal proceedings.
What to do next
- Disable JavaScript-blocking extensions (e.g., JShelter) when accessing BAILII Ireland legal cases
Archived snapshot
Apr 15, 2026GovPing captured this document from the original source. If the source has since changed or been removed, this is the text as it existed at that time.
Making sure you're not a bot!
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You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam. The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable, but at mass scraper levels it adds up and makes scraping much more expensive.
Ultimately, this is a placeholder solution so that more time can be spent on fingerprinting and identifying headless browsers (EG: via how they do font rendering) so that the challenge proof of work page doesn't need to be presented to users that are much more likely to be legitimate.
Please note that Anubis requires the use of modern JavaScript features that plugins like JShelter will disable. Please disable JShelter or other such plugins for this domain.
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