Verification Page Blocks Access to Scottish Court Decision 2026CSIH18
Summary
BAILII Scotland's online case database has implemented Anubis, a Proof-of-Work anti-bot verification system, as a placeholder while more sophisticated fingerprinting measures are developed. The system presents a CAPTCHA-like challenge to visitors to differentiate legitimate users from automated scrapers, including AI company bots. Legitimate users may need to disable JavaScript-blocking plugins such as JShelter to proceed.
What changed
The verification page serves as an access control mechanism for the BAILII Scotland case database. It imposes no legal obligations, penalties, or compliance requirements on any party. The Anubis system uses Proof-of-Work (Hashcash-style) challenges to increase operational costs for mass scrapers at scale while remaining negligible for individual legitimate users. BAILII states the solution is temporary pending development of more sophisticated headless browser detection methods.
Affected parties seeking to access Scottish court decisions through BAILII may need to adjust browser settings or disable privacy plugins to complete the JavaScript-based verification challenge. This is an administrative access control measure with no regulatory or compliance implications.
What to do next
- Monitor for updates
Archived snapshot
Apr 13, 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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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.
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