Anti-Bot Verification Page Blocks Access to EWCA/Crim/2026/490
Summary
BAILII deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work-based anti-bot protection system, to protect its servers against AI web scraping. The system uses a Hashcash-style challenge that imposes negligible load on individual users but makes mass scraping economically impractical. Users must enable JavaScript to proceed past the verification.
“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.”
What changed
BAILII added Anubis, a proof-of-work-based anti-bot verification system, to its website infrastructure. The system uses a Hashcash-style challenge that is imperceptible to legitimate users but becomes computationally expensive at scale for automated scrapers.
There are no compliance obligations or regulatory implications from this technical deployment. Legal professionals and compliance officers accessing BAILII for case law research should ensure JavaScript is enabled and disable browser extensions that block JavaScript functionality (such as JShelter) for the bailii.org domain.
Archived snapshot
Apr 21, 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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