Anubis finally ships WebAssembly after a year of work

I have every copy of Firefox here configured with webassembly disabled...because I don't tend to do what Webassembly was designed for, i.e. online games, video/audio editing, emulation, etc. [1] and because I dislike things running in the background without my knowledge.

So this is going to be interesting.

My plea (in a small voice) to the OP: just as many sites still do for JavaScript, please add a "This captcha required Webassembly to continue" message to your code when Webassembly is disabled. And, incidentally, for smaller platforms/browsers that don't offer a Webassembly engine at all.

[1] https://webassembly.org/docs/use-cases/

Hats off to Xe for spending so much time on backwards compatibility, especially the tidbit about targeting Chrome 66.

I have a Mac from 2014 running Yosemite that I occasionally use to test for backwards compatibility in my own frontend code (for fun!). But IMO the best way to ensure compatibility is to use period-correct toolchains or toolchains where the pace of change is slower, like ClojureScript.

> It also means that the "hey Claude vibeslop me a CUDA Anubis solver" route is on its way to being fundamentally dead.

I assume that the previous challenges will still be available for circumstances where WASM is not available (unless we are just working on the basis that it is available if JS is?) or perhaps as a fallback. TFA explicitly mentions “smart” TVs, and I'm sure there are plenty of those out there that run browsers old enough to not know what WASM is. TBH these would not be a priority for me, but they obviously are for this project given they (well, TVs generally, not specifically elderly ones) get specific mention in this write-up.

If so, what is to stop scrapers from just forcing the fallback POW option instead of trying to run the new memory-hard algorithm at all?

You can use Rust's `wasm32v1-none` target to get baseline WASM with no extra target features. (This restricts you to `#[no_std]`, however.) https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/platform-support/wasm32v1-no...

Is there a place where I can try out if my browser is compatible? Easier to find out now than when I'm trying to get work done and a million websites now have it deployed

On https://wasm-feature-detect.surma.technology it shows that I don't have 3 of all these features but I'm not sure if Anubis needs any of them to not kick me back to the pure JS solution

Which would apparently be bad because

> The WebAssembly that's shipped with this flow is ridiculously performant. This may mean you need to adjust the difficulty [upward, to avoid that bots solve it trivially when they support wasm, I assume this means]

combined with

> The wasm2js flow doesn't currently have a way to update the progress bar [so you have no clue about remaining time]

(wouldn't be the first time that I gave up on a page because it was stuck on 0 hashes per second)

Tangential but all the pages I see protected by Anubis are just static HTML. But bot traffic is only harmful on dynamic pages right?

It would be cool if the POW could be done ahead of time. That way I don't get stuck waiting while I'm working. Some type of credit/tokens that my browser could then spend.