Changeflow GovPing Courts & Legal Anubis Bot Verification Block on BAILII Norther...
Routine Notice Added Final

Anubis Bot Verification Block on BAILII Northern Ireland

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Summary

BAILII Northern Ireland deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work bot verification system, to protect its servers against automated scraping by AI companies. The system uses a Hashcash-style challenge requiring JavaScript computation to access case documents at nie/cases/NIHC/Fam/2026/8.html. Legitimate users may need to disable browser extensions like JShelter to pass the verification.

What changed

BAILII added Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot system, as a placeholder protection while developing more sophisticated fingerprinting methods to detect headless browsers. The system imposes a computational cost on mass scraping operations without significantly impacting individual users.

Legal professionals and researchers accessing Northern Ireland court documents through BAILII should ensure JavaScript is enabled and temporarily disable any privacy-focused browser extensions that may interfere with the proof-of-work challenge. The block affects automated access but should not impact normal manual browsing.

What to do next

  1. Disable JShelter or similar browser extensions for bailii.org

Archived snapshot

Apr 15, 2026

GovPing 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.

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Last updated

Classification

Agency
BAILII
Instrument
Notice
Legal weight
Non-binding
Stage
Final
Change scope
Minor

Who this affects

Applies to
Legal professionals Courts
Industry sector
5112 Software & Technology
Activity scope
Legal information access Server protection
Geographic scope
United Kingdom GB

Taxonomy

Primary area
Judicial Administration
Operational domain
IT Security
Topics
Cybersecurity Data Privacy

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