Bot Verification Page for EWCA/Crim/2026/450
Summary
BAILII deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work bot protection system, to block AI scraping of legal databases. The system uses Hashcash-style computational challenges to increase costs for mass scraping while imposing minimal burden on legitimate individual users. The page displays a technical challenge to visitors accessing case EWCA/Crim/2026/450, requiring JavaScript to proceed.
What changed
BAILII added a bot verification checkpoint powered by Anubis, a proof-of-work system similar to Hashcash, to protect server resources against automated scraping by AI companies. The system requires visitors to execute JavaScript to solve a computational challenge before accessing case documents.
For legal researchers and practitioners accessing EWCA/Crim/2026/450 through BAILII, the main impact is operational: users with anti-tracking browser extensions must temporarily disable them to proceed. There are no compliance obligations, regulatory deadlines, or penalties associated with this technical change. It represents routine infrastructure maintenance by a legal information service.
What to do next
- Disable JavaScript-blocking extensions such as JShelter to access the protected case page
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!
Loading...
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
Get daily alerts for BAILII England & Wales Recent Decisions
Daily digest delivered to your inbox.
Free. Unsubscribe anytime.
About this page
Every important government, regulator, and court update from around the world. One place. Real-time. Free. Our mission
Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.
The summary, classification, recommended actions, deadlines, and penalty information are AI-generated from the original text and may contain errors. Always verify against the source document.
Classification
Who this affects
Taxonomy
Browse Categories
Get alerts for this source
We'll email you when BAILII England & Wales Recent Decisions publishes new changes.
Subscribed!
Optional. Filters your digest to exactly the updates that matter to you.