Security Check Blocks Access to Legal Case
Summary
BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) published a security notice informing users that its website now employs Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot system inspired by Hashcash, to protect server resources against aggressive AI web scraping. The system adds computational overhead for mass scrapers while remaining negligible for individual users. Users with JavaScript-disabling plugins such as JShelter must disable them to access case content.
What changed
BAILII has added a proof-of-work challenge page as a security measure against automated scraping of legal case documents. The Anubis system uses Hashcash-style computational requirements to differentiate between legitimate users and bots, making large-scale scraping economically unfeasible while imposing minimal impact on normal visitors.
Legal professionals and researchers relying on BAILII for England & Wales case law should ensure their browser settings allow JavaScript execution and disable any privacy plugins like JShelter that may interfere with the challenge mechanism. The change does not impose regulatory compliance obligations but affects technical access procedures for legal databases.
Archived snapshot
Apr 17, 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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