Jonathan Corbet

“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” an internal Microsoft document cited in the case read, adding “almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.” https://www.404media.co/doom-loop-openai-and-microsoft-admits-llms-are-destroying-the-web-and-built-on-theft/

This, evidently, is what I look like when giving a talk these days.

@jorge@hachyderm.io @zonker Credit-card banks treat "donations" rather differently than they treat sales of a service; soliciting donations could land us in the worst kind of trouble. We've been there, many years ago, and it nearly killed LWN altogether. Thank you for your support!

@kees@hachyderm.io Gee, sounds like being the docs maintainer :)

@mntmn@mastodon.social @Hex@kolektiva.social It's not just those bozos ... some folks at opscloudio.com asked if they could run banners on our site selling the same sort of SDK. We declined...

@liw@toot.liw.fi @baldur@toot.cafe Hey, some of us aren't dead yet! A few dinosaurs still roam, for now...

@federicomena@mstdn.mx We have a 2019 Bolt, maintenance has been rotating the tires, really nothing else. Regenerative braking means you don't go through a lot of brake pads either. The maintenance story is one of the great things about EV that folks don't yet appreciate.

@osm_tech You are definitely not alone: https://lwn.net/Articles/1008897/ The situation is not sustainable but I'm not sure what we do about it beyond waiting for the AI bubble to burst.

@LWN@fosstodon.org See also: Vint Cerf's comments on Dave's passing: "I could not say better than Frank already has how much Dave's work has helped to improve our experience of the Internet. I can't think of anyone more dedicated to the proposition that performance counts and should be pursued with determination and vigor. I've known Dave for many years and greatly valued his counsel and technical skills - to say nothing of his healthy sense of humor. I will miss him but will be always grateful to have known him." https://lwn.net/ml/all/CAHxHggemafY9UP6Zm3oXVWWX5Wd+ffauot5MCN-6Gv-pOx3=Sg@mail.gmail.com

@josefbacik@hachyderm.io Oh wow ... I'm glad for you, but you'll be badly missed in these parts. Do come visit sometimes, OK?

@luis_in_brief@social.coop @Edent@mastodon.social I looked at longevity a bit one year ago: https://lwn.net/Articles/956765/ . I should run those numbers again. The brief answer is that some of those people obviously drop their one patch and move on, but others do indeed stick around for the long term.

@Edent@mastodon.social So this appears to be a lightly disguised criticism of the kernel project ... the project that is working hard to incorporate Rust into a 30+-year-old code base, is (slowly) developing new contribution tools, and sees 2-300 new contributors in each and every one of its nine-week release cycles. There are plenty of problems in kernelland, but they will not be improved by a distorted view like this.

@binder@hackers.town @luis_in_brief@social.coop @Edent@mastodon.social Strange, I have not seen much "steamrolling" going on, certainly not on the part of the Rust folks. But, if you have thoughts on how things could run more smoothly, joining the mailing-list discussion with constructive comments might be a good thing to do.

@carlrichell@fosstodon.org Nice work! I've been bugging my own reps, but haven't even gotten a response from them so far.

Ah what a world we have built... "In addition to enlisting the user’s TV box in ad fraud networks, these off-brand streaming devices almost universally come with residential proxy software pre-installed. This software rents the user’s Internet address out to anonymous paying customers, who run the gamut from aggressive content scraping firms to ticket scalpers and outright cybercriminals. What’s more, because these generic (and generally dirt cheap) TV boxes are all horribly insecure by default and bereft of any kind of authentication, installing one on your home or office network only invites further mischief. In January, the proxy tracking service Synthient documented how multiple botnets had rapidly enslaved millions of TV boxes using a complex interplay of security vulnerabilities in both the residential proxy software and the streaming devices themselves." https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/07/read-this-before-you-buy-that-tv-streaming-stick/

@WesternInfidels I've seen stories of maintainers who have found themselves talking to a contributor who is just relaying questions to the LLM and feeding the answers back. Haven't been there myself, yet, so far as i know...

I have heard of similar things happening at other companies. Call me old fashioned, but to me it seems that a company that judges its employees based on how many AI tokens they consume has badly lost its way.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/amazon-employees-are-tokenmaxxing-due-to-pressure-to-use-ai-tools/

GrapheneOS has a "duress code" feature that will wipe the device if it is used in an attempt to unlock it. A potentially useful feature, but the US is now trying to prosecute somebody for having given the duress code to an officer demanding the unlocking of his phone. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/23/cop-city-protester-phone

@linuxandyarn Welcome to the world of AI scraper bots ... https://lwn.net/Articles/1008897/ Looking at the web page of a company called "Bright Data" is informative too.

Years ago, I complained loudly when the Fedora project proclaimed that its mailing lists were dead and all discussions would move to its forum silo. So, needless to say, I applaud the decision (or at least the proposed decision) to begin moving back toward the mailing lists: https://lwn.net/ml/all/CAJqbrbdZ9R47=otYx2h5YmCFcsKzA7xHVWqWAZ2qT4503gLZCg@mail.gmail.com

It's almost enough to make me want to get a cat.

https://soranews24.com/2026/03/27/japan-now-has-a-special-desk-for-people-who-work-at-home-with-a-pet-catphotos/

So let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that you were foolish enough to try to make a living by writing high-quality, well-researched, technical articles about Linux and free-software development. I know that's crazy, but bear with me. In such a scenario, how does one succeed in a world increasingly full of stuff like this?

https://www.webpronews.com/linux-7-0-looms-large-inside-the-landmark-kernel-release-that-could-reshape-open-source-computing/

(I'll post no more links to that site, I promise).

These folks appear to take the stuff we humans write, inject a bunch of errors, then slop it out to the world.

If you were to engage in the silly quest described above, you would find that what you do is increasingly buried in the flood of this kind of material. Does anybody have any bright ideas about how one might survive in such an environment?

"The manufacturer had the power to remotely disable devices and used it against me for blocking their data collection."

https://codetiger.github.io/blog/the-day-my-smart-vacuum-turned-against-me/

...and people wonder why I resist having that kind of stuff in my home...

Today I got an email from a local farm saying that they will not be doing a community supported agriculture (CSA) program this year because they don't think there will be enough water to grow food.

Need I say this is not a good sign?

As the number of LLM-generated patches in my inbox increases, I am starting to experience the sort of maintainer stress that has long been predicted. But there's another aspect of this that has recently crossed my mind.

Just over a week ago, a new personality showed up with a whole pile of machine-generated patches claiming to fill in our memory-management documentation. A few reviewers had some sharp questions, the response to which has been ... silence. This person doesn't seem to have cared enough about that work to make an effort to get past the initial resistance.

Once upon a time, somebody who had produced many pages of MM documentation would be invested enough in that work to make at least a minimal attempt to defend it.

Kernel developers often worry that a patch submitter will not stick around to maintain the code they are trying to push upstream. Part of the gauntlet of getting kernel patches accepted can be seen as a sort of "are you serious?" test.

When somebody submits a big pile of machine-generated code, though, will they be *able* to maintain it? And will they be sufficiently invested in this code, which they didn't write and probably don't understand, to stick around and fix the inevitable problems that will arise? I rather fear not, and that does not bode well for the long-term maintainability of our software.

@luis_in_brief @osm_tech We (LWN) have seen attacks from over one-million IP addresses over the course of a few hours, repeatedly downloading stuff we published 20 years ago. Who knows, maybe somebody will go back in time and change Darl McBride's mind, so you gotta keep checking...

Random, unordered, probably useless thoughts on today's apocalypxze...

Part of the success in getting this into Debian may be the result of there being no xz maintainer there. It is "maintained" by people whose attention is normally elsewhere doing occasional non-maintainer updates.

This code will have been running on the machines of a lot of distribution maintainers. If it has already been exploited, it could be that its real purpose has already been achieved and the real problem is now elsewhere. I sure hope somebody can figure out a way to determine if this backdoor has been used.

The multi-front nature of the attack, including multiple efforts to get the malicious code installed more widely more quickly, suggests we're not just dealing with a lone sociopath. I fear we'll never know who was really behind this, but I would sure like to.

There is surely more where this cam from.

I'm back from LSFMM+BPF (and a rather longer sojourn in Europe). Still tired. I'm now well into the process of writing articles about the discussions I was part of, which is a lot of typing. In the immortal words of Ringo Starr: "I'VE GOT BLISTERS ON MY FINGERS!"

LSFMM remains one of the most intense, technically challenging, and interesting events in the kernel space, and this year's gathering didn't disappoint. It was, though, somewhat overshadowed by the rounds of layoffs happening in the industry. There were developers present who had lost their jobs, or feared losing their jobs, or were working for companies that have decreed that they are no longer interested in upstream development. That added to the general sense of darkness that overlays much of life these days.

Things will get better soon, right?

I've been spending rather too much of my time reading the depressing threads on LLM use in the kernel. But I thought that this contribution from Lyude Paul worth the investment. "For many people who need their jobs, guidelines around acceptable use of these tools beyond "a person needs to own the the code" may end up being the only thing allowing employees to be responsible with their contributions without repercussion from employers." https://lwn.net/ml/all/3a5d891b536588e8e4fc84d60a5c8af72091d852.camel@redhat.com

@carlrichell The record for earliest 90°F day here in Boulder is late May. They are saying it could happen tomorrow. In March. I'm surprised you found any snow at all...looks like fun, anyway!

Ah joy ... Google is turning off its URL shortener and breaking every link that ever used it:

https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-links-will-no-longer-be-available/

A quick search on lore.kernel.org:

https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=goo.gl%2F

...turns up about 19,000 messages with affected links. That's a lot of history that is going to become harder (or impossible) to find.

@Epic_Null@infosec.exchange @Li@tech.lgbt The first step after a GrapheneOS install is to lock the bootloader again so no, it's not unlocked.

Dan Carpenter is looking for support for his ongoing bug-fixing work:

https://lwn.net/ml/all/caa37f28-a2e8-4e0a-a9ce-a365ce805e4b@stanley.mountain

He says: "The situation isn't great. The zero day bot can't do cross function analsysis and it only looks at checks with a low false positive rate. We're missing out on a bunch of bugs." *Not* missing those bugs sounds like it would be a good thing.

The @lwn@fedi.lwn.net web site is currently under the most intense scraper attack I have seen yet. 1.3M unique IP addresses within the last couple of hours, and it's not done yet. The work we have done on defenses appears to be paying off, though; the server is holding up reasonably well — so far. ...just in case anybody wonders why I have a rather dim view of the whole AI industry...

I'm not normally one for posting videos, but I stumbled across this recording of Neil Young playing Cowgirl in the Sand and no work got done for a solid 20 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CBCnaHDpwQ

"More generally, liability concerns could mean that many current use cases for agents won’t be commercially viable. Companies may not be able to profitably operate AI lawyers, doctors and media influencers if they are held responsible for what they say and do. We’re OK with this outcome. There’s nothing in the law that requires us to accommodate AI systems if they are fundamentally untrustworthy, just as we don’t need to accommodate untrustworthy human systems." — Bruce Schneier https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/06/ai-and-liability.html

@archiloque@felin.social Well, the coreutils 9.7 release fixed a relevant bug: "'cat' would fail with "input file is output file" if input and output are the same terminal device and the output is append-only. [bug introduced in coreutils-9.6]" But the cat-related news has been rather scarce since then.

@gezza@mastodon.ie The subscriber link feature is likely to be the droid you are looking for: https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#slinks