Bot Verification Page Blocks Access to Bailii.org
Summary
BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot protection system, on its website. Users accessing case law documents may encounter a bot verification challenge before proceeding. The system uses Hashcash-style proof-of-work to increase the cost of mass web scraping by AI companies. The page instructs users to disable JavaScript-disabling plugins like JShelter to access content.
“Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam.”
What changed
BAILII has implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work-based anti-bot protection mechanism. The system presents a verification challenge to visitors before granting access to legal case law documents. This is an infrastructure change by the legal information provider, not a regulatory or compliance requirement.
Website visitors who encounter the verification page may need to enable JavaScript and disable plugins like JShelter that interfere with the proof-of-work computation. There are no compliance obligations imposed on any regulated entity by this technical change.
Archived snapshot
Apr 22, 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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