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• Post #4249935

  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 d...

• Post #4044018

  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

• Post #4038172

  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

• Post #3861391

  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/3a5d891b53...

• Post #3819097

  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

• Post #3573753

  "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 http...

• Post #3454744

  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...

• Post #2521334

  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/

• Post #2500056

  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, some...

• Post #2396950

  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.

• Post #2092814

  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 t...

• Post #1813461

  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/

• Post #1351790

  "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...

• Post #1142908

  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.

• Post #982631

  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 n...

• Post #764858

  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?

• Post #733214

  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...