Anti-Bot Verification Page Blocking Access to England and Wales High Court Case
Summary
BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) is displaying an anti-bot verification placeholder page for case EWHC/Ch/2026/870. The page explains that BAILII uses Anubis, a proof-of-work system modelled on Hashcash, to protect against AI scraping that causes server downtime. The system presents a computational challenge to browsers that legitimate users can pass with ignorable delay, while making mass scraping more expensive. BAILII states this is a temporary measure while they develop fingerprinting and headless browser detection capabilities. The page notes that JavaScript features required by Anubis may be disabled by privacy plugins such as JShelter.
“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.”
About this source
BAILII, the British and Irish Legal Information Institute, is the open-access publisher of UK case law. The England and Wales Recent Decisions feed aggregates every newly published judgment from the High Court, Court of Appeal, and specialist divisions: Chancery, Commercial Court, Administrative Court, Family, Patents, Technology and Construction. Around 200 published opinions a month. BAILII is the closest thing to a free Westlaw for UK judgments and the standard citation source for academic and practitioner work that does not have a paid database licence. GovPing tracks each new decision as it appears, with the case name, court, judge, and citation. Watch this if you brief English commercial litigation, follow Chancery and TCC trends, or research UK judgments from outside a paid platform.
What changed
The intended court judgment (EWHC/Ch/2026/870) is inaccessible; instead, visitors encounter BAILII's Anubis anti-bot verification page. This page describes BAILII's proof-of-work defence against automated scraping, modelled on Hashcash, which imposes a negligible computational cost on individual users but increases the resource burden on mass scrapers. The page is informational only and does not impose any regulatory or compliance obligations on visitors.
Legal professionals and researchers seeking to access England and Wales High Court decisions via BAILII may encounter this verification step. No action is required beyond enabling JavaScript in the browser and disabling privacy plugins such as JShelter that block the required features. The page does not indicate when or whether the underlying case will become accessible without verification.
Archived snapshot
Apr 23, 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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Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.
The summary, classification, recommended actions, deadlines, and penalty information are AI-generated from the original text and may contain errors. Always verify against the source document.
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