Changeflow GovPing Courts & Legal Bot Verification Page Blocking Access to EWHC 904
Routine Notice Added Final

Bot Verification Page Blocking Access to EWHC 904

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Summary

BAILII has implemented Anubis, a bot protection system using Proof-of-Work (Hashcash-style) to mitigate aggressive AI web scraping. The system requires modern JavaScript and may conflict with browser privacy plugins like JShelter. This is a placeholder security measure pending development of more sophisticated headless browser fingerprinting techniques.

Published by BAILII on bailii.org . Detected, standardized, and enriched by GovPing. Review our methodology and editorial standards .

What changed

BAILII has deployed Anubis bot protection on its EWHC case pages. The system imposes Proof-of-Work computations on visitors to deter mass AI scraping, which can cause server downtime. Users must enable JavaScript and disable privacy plugins like JShelter to proceed. This is an interim technical measure while more targeted fingerprinting of headless browsers is developed.

For users attempting to access court decisions on BAILII, the main implication is operational: legitimate users may experience delays or access barriers if they use privacy-enhancing browser extensions or older browsers. Legal researchers, AI tools, and automated systems will face additional computational hurdles to access case documents.

Archived snapshot

Apr 18, 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
Consumers Legal professionals
Industry sector
5112 Software & Technology
Activity scope
Web scraping Bot protection Server security
Geographic scope
United Kingdom GB

Taxonomy

Primary area
Cybersecurity
Operational domain
IT Security
Topics
Data Privacy

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