Notices by Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Sep-2025 08:09:43 JST 
Jonathan Corbet
If you run an operation that pays freelance authors for articles, you get a *lot* of people trying to sell you the output from their slop factory of choice. These pitches far exceed the legitimate ones at this point.
Today we got a pitch for an article about the load-balancing scheduler regression caused by the sched_ext framework in the 6.11 release. Somebody has clearly put a bit more than the usual amount of attention into the sort of topic that might appeal to @lwn. There is only one little problem... that regression had nothing to do with sched_ext, which was merged in 6.12. The pitch was a bunch of authoritative-sounding bullshit; the article would surely have been more of the same.
Sometimes I truly lose hope about humanity's ability to keep its head above the flood of this stuff. -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Sep-2025 05:37:08 JST
Jonathan Corbet
...that feeling of dread that comes when your bank starts sending cheery emails about how wonderful their reimplemented app is going to be... -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Aug-2025 06:45:47 JST
Jonathan Corbet
The fact that Microsoft is reorganizing the management of GitHub, which it purchased in 2018, is not particularly surprising.
The fact that it is being moved into Microsoft's AI operation, though, says a lot about what GitHub is actually for now.
https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas-dohmke-resignation-coreai-team-transition -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Monday, 28-Jul-2025 20:59:28 JST
Jonathan Corbet
list_add(figure_out_postgresql_replication, &task_list);
list_add(Linode, &shit_list); -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Monday, 28-Jul-2025 20:59:27 JST
Jonathan Corbet
Just got a note from them saying "the storage for the physical host that your Linode resides on is in a degraded state.
Our team has determined that there is a *potential* for data loss or corruption for all services residing on it"
Oh, and also that they'll continue charging us for it anyway until we delete it. -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Friday, 11-Jul-2025 00:02:13 JST
Jonathan Corbet
It's awfully easy to get depressed about the state of the world, so an article like this one, on the speed and scope of the solar-power transition, is more than welcome.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-years-on-the-sun-is-having-a-moment -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Friday, 27-Jun-2025 00:16:30 JST
Jonathan Corbet
The net is full of articles and pictures about Linus Torvalds meeting Bill Gates. They all gloss over the fact that Dave Cutler was also there — to the point of cropping him out of the picture. Somehow, it seems, the guy who did RSX-11, VMS, and Windows NT is relevant too...? -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Friday, 27-Jun-2025 00:13:11 JST
Jonathan Corbet
It took a long time and over 60 articles but, at @lwn, we have finally managed to complete our reporting from the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. If you want to know what is going on in those core parts of the kernel, this is the place to look.
We've put together an EPUB version of the whole set as well — good bedtime reading!
https://lwn.net/Articles/1026338/ -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Friday, 20-Jun-2025 05:00:41 JST
Jonathan Corbet
The Wayback Machine managed to capture a Linux Journal article about the Arch Linux distribution's plan to switch to "rye-init" before whatever human intelligence remains there figured out that "rye-init" does not actually exist.
The Linux Journal predates LWN by some years and was, for a long time, the definitive read for Linux users. The Don Marti ( @dmarti ) years were especially noteworthy. It is sad to see where it has ended up now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250618001301/https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/arch-linux-breaks-new-ground-official-rust-init-system-support-arrives -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Thursday, 12-Jun-2025 04:05:42 JST
Jonathan Corbet
@ljs @ptesarik You made me curious, so I did a couple of checks ... there are all of 12 commits in the mainline with Nacked-by tags. The most productive Nakers are Christoph Hellwig and Tetsuo Handa, with three each. There are single nacks from Hannes Reinecke, Jakub Kicinski, Manish Chopra, Pablo Neira Ayuso, Rob Herring, and Tejun Heo.
All the rest of you are slacking. -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Thursday, 01-May-2025 05:46:21 JST
Jonathan Corbet
I have often complained that, even though thousands of developers are paid to work on the Linux kernel, there is not a single person whose job it is to write documentation for the kernel. The problem is wider than that, though: Alejandro Colomar, who has been maintaining the man pages collection for the last four years, can no longer afford to do it for free.
https://lwn.net/ml/all/4d7tq6a7febsoru3wjium4ekttuw2ouocv6jstdkthnacmzr6x@f2zfbe5hs7h5 -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Monday, 07-Apr-2025 22:52:18 JST
Jonathan Corbet
20 Years ago: the BitKeeper license changed, making it unavailable for kernel development.
https://lwn.net/Articles/130746/
It drove home the perils of relying on proprietary software and spurred the creation of Git - a significant event, overall. -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Monday, 31-Mar-2025 01:11:38 JST
Jonathan Corbet
Today I got a cheery email from somebody who claims to be the "ethics and compliance" officer for a company called Bright Data. He wanted to have a "no pressure" conversation about the whole AI scraperbot problem. Looking at their web site, this company offers an API that, and I quote, "Bypasses anti-scraping mechanisms and solves CAPTCHAs, ensuring uninterrupted access to the most protected web sites".
After careful consideration for several milliseconds, I have concluded that I really don't have anything to discuss with this person.
But at least their claimed "100M+" of residential IP addresses that they use for their DDOS attacks are "ethically sourced". -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Thursday, 13-Mar-2025 08:29:12 JST
Jonathan Corbet
Ah the memories one finds at the bottom of a desk drawer... Once upon a time this was a really cool thing. -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Feb-2025 04:46:59 JST
Jonathan Corbet
So, while I think this article declares victory a bit too soon, I think we also need the occasional optimistic view that we may actually get through this administration.
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-02-24-trump-coup-has-failed/
(by way of @pluralistic) -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Friday, 24-Jan-2025 23:44:25 JST
Jonathan Corbet
@mcdanlj @LWN What a lot of people are suggesting (nepethenes and such) will work great against a single abusive robot. None of it will help much when tens of thousands of sites are grabbing a few URLs each. Most of them will never step into the honeypot, and the ones that do will not be seen again regardless. -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 23:39:10 JST
Jonathan Corbet
@penguin42 They don't tell me what they are doing with the data... the distributed scraping is an easily observable fact, though. Perhaps they are firehosing the data back to the mothership for training? -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 12:25:08 JST
Jonathan Corbet
@smxi @monsieuricon Suggestions for these countermeasures - and how to apply them without hosing legitimate users - would be much appreciated. I'm glad they are obvious to you, please do share! -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 11:59:18 JST
Jonathan Corbet
So I guess I'm famous now :)
https://www.heise.de/en/news/AI-bots-paralyze-Linux-news-site-and-others-10252162.html
To be clear, LWN has never "crashed" as a result of this onslaught. We'll not talk about what happened after I pushed up some code trying to address it...
Most seriously, though: I'm surprised that this situation is surprising to anybody at this point. This is a net-wide problem, it surely is not limited to free-software-oriented sites. But if the problem is starting to get wider attention, that is fine with me... -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 08:20:50 JST
Jonathan Corbet
A followup for folks who are curious about the whole AI botswarm problem...
Some of these bots are clearly running on a bunch of machines on the same net. I have been able to reduce the traffic significantly by treating everything as a class-C net and doing subnet-level throttling. That and simply blocking a couple of them.
But that leaves a lot of traffic with an interesting characteristic: there are millions of obvious bot hits (following a pattern through the site, for example) that all come from a different IP. An access log with 9M lines as over 1M IP addresses, and few of them appear more than about three times.
So these things are running on widely distributed botnets, likely on compromised computers, and they are doing their best to evade any sort of recognition or throttling. I don't think that any sort of throttling or database of known-bot IPs is going to help here...not quite sure what to do about it.
What a world we have made for ourselves...
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