Anti-Bot Verification Page Using Proof-of-Work Scheme
Summary
BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) displays a bot verification page when accessing certain case documents. The page implements Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-scraping mechanism derived from Hashcash principles, to protect server resources from automated AI scraping while legitimate users complete a brief verification challenge.
What changed
The anti-bot verification page describes a technical security measure implemented by BAILII rather than a legal case or regulatory document. The page uses Anubis, a proof-of-work challenge mechanism inspired by Hashcash, to impose computational costs on mass automated scraping while remaining negligible for individual legitimate users. The page acknowledges this as a temporary solution pending development of more sophisticated headless browser fingerprinting.
For users encountering this page, no regulatory compliance obligations are created. The page is informational, explaining why access requires JavaScript and how proof-of-work deters automated scraping. Users must simply complete the verification challenge or disable blocking plugins to proceed to the intended legal document.
What to do next
- Disable JavaScript-blocking browser extensions such as JShelter for the BAILII domain to proceed
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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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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