Bot Verification Challenge Blocks Access to IEHC/2026/198
Summary
BAILII Ireland's website has deployed Anubis, a Proof-of-Work bot verification system, to protect against aggressive AI web scraping. The system requires JavaScript to process a computational challenge before accessing legal case content. Users with anti-detection browser extensions like JShelter may need to disable these plugins to access case documents.
What changed
The Anubis bot protection system has been deployed on BAILII Ireland as a technical measure against AI scraping. The system uses Hashcash-style Proof-of-Work challenges that add minimal load for individual users but become computationally expensive at scale for mass scrapers. This is a placeholder solution while more sophisticated fingerprinting for headless browsers is developed.\n\nLegal researchers and practitioners accessing BAILII for case law should note this additional verification step. Users with privacy-focused browser extensions may need to whitelist bailii.org domains to access legal content reliably.
What to do next
- Disable JShelter or similar browser extensions for bailii.org to access case content
- Enable modern JavaScript to complete the Proof-of-Work verification
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.
Related changes
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