Aug 23, 2025 15:00:00

What on earth is the 'illustration of a girl with animal ears' that appears for a moment on some websites?

Many people have encountered an illustration of a girl with furry ears holding a magnifying glass when visiting some websites, such as

the Linux kernel source code public page . This furry ear girl screen was developed to protect websites from excessive access by automated bots.

Anubis: Web AI Firewall Utility | Anubis
https://anubis.techaro.lol/

Below is a screenshot of the FFmpeg source code page . It shows an illustration of a furry-eared girl with the message 'We're verifying you're not a robot!'

This furry-eared girl screen is from a bot-blocking program called 'Anubis.' The Anubis website states, 'Weigh the soul of incoming HTTP requests to protect your website!' The name 'Anubis' is taken from

Anubis , the god of the underworld who holds a scale. Anubis also boasts features such as 'running in the background, requiring no user interaction,' 'being extremely lightweight and not impacting hosting costs,' and 'customizable with unique policies.' Since Anubis is often depicted with a wolf's head or in the actual wolf form, the fluffy ears of Anubis's furry-eared girl are likely inspired by wolves.

A key feature of Anubis is that it is developed as open source under the MIT license. While it's possible to use a CAPTCHA service like Cloudflare to prevent excessive bot access, Anubis is useful in situations where you want to avoid using proprietary services. The Anubis source code is available at the link below, and the README includes the following unique statement: 'In most cases, Anubis is unnecessary and Cloudflare will suffice. However, Anubis can be useful in situations where Cloudflare cannot or is not available.'

GitHub - TecharoHQ/anubis: Weighs the soul of incoming HTTP requests to stop AI crawlers
https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

Anubis works by requesting background computations from users who access the site, effectively preventing access by bots that lack computational capabilities or that dislike the wait time required for computation. This supposedly prevents excessive access by bots from AI companies and other bots. Some online posts have suggested that the blocking effect may be limited because AI companies have powerful computing resources. However, Anubis developer Xe commented, 'Anubis forces attackers to rebuild their scrapers to handle the computational load. This increases the infrastructure costs of AI companies that spread malicious traffic. It's expected that scraping will become economically unviable if AI companies are forced to invest in a large amount of hardware for Anubis.'

In addition, because the standby screen of Anubis displays an 'illustration of a girl with animal ears' that has a different atmosphere from a serious site, some users mistakenly believe that they are being hacked, and a question has been posted on the Anubis project's Issues page asking, 'Is it possible to display a screen other than the girl with animal ears?' The Anubis documentation instructs users to contact Xe and enter into a contract if they want a version that does not display the girl with animal ears.

Supporting Anubis financially | Anubis
https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/funding/