Anubis rarely ever annoys me (I still prefer it over cloudflare’s Mitm) but this specific visit feels almost vindictive. It used half my CPU cores at full blast for three straight minutes.
It seems to be effective since I can’t really “bypass” it with extensions, so AI crawlers probably can’t either, but damn there really should be an option to complete a manual captcha or email the administrators to complain.
As I’m typing this the challenge is still running xD
I don’t know how protein folding works, but if it’s easy to check it’s correct, then doesn’t that violate that mathematical principle where verifying an answer is as difficult as computing the answer in the first place? I forget the name of it.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, volunteers at home are already self-selecting to be mostly honest and donating correct answers for a good cause. Their output trustworthiness is moderate-high. Spammers, bots, A.I. swarms, ddos networks, random users, etc… not so much. You can’t really trust their output at all, you have to verify it very carefully and treat it as malicious or just incorrect junk by default.
What the distributed computing stuff does is check many many potential answers. You’re only interested in the right answers, and they’re easy to verify. If there’s a concern about junk answers, the answers could probably be compared across multiple clients to verify.