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Jonathan Corbet

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.
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Jonathan Corbet

I got a phishy-looking text from LWN's bank asking me to confirm that I really wanted to spend over $2000 in a Minnesota shoe store. It turns out that it really was the bank, though. People who know me know that shoes are not one of my bigger budget items ... so, once again, somebody has leaked my card information.

Thus begins the whole process of disputing the charges, getting a new card, updating the recurring charges before things start bouncing, etc. Just what I was planning to do this day.
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K. Ryabitsev-Prime 🍁

The Open Source Summit North America is in May this year, in the lovely Minneapolis, where nothing is happening. Nosiree, nothing that would want a bunch of people think twice about attending.
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Jonathan Corbet

As of the last count, @lwn has been hit by 1.6 million unique IP addresses since yesterday morning. We have managed to stabilize the site against that level of attack, but it is still annoying.

If only we could get them all to subscribe.

I do find myself wondering if there isn't material for a good class-action lawsuit here. We are far from the only ones having to cope with this crap. I'm not normally much of a fan of the US class-action lawsuit machine, but extracting money from the Bright Datas of the world to make some lawyers richer doesn't sound like an entirely bad proposition.
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Jonathan Corbet

For the curious, today's scraperbot attack on @lwn has run to well over 800,000 unique IP addresses in the last few hours.

We've made some tweaks that are holding it off for now, but it is ongoing and could go bad again at any time.

If you are a real user and are being turned away by the site, could you let me know what your user agent is?
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Jonathan Corbet

So @lwn is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet. It is a DDOS attack involving tens of thousands of addresses, and that is affecting the responsiveness of the site, unfortunately.

There are many things I would like to do with my time. Defending LWN from AI shitheads is rather far from the top of that list. I *really* don't want to put obstacles between LWN and its readers, but it may come to that.

(Another grumpy day, sorry)
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Jonathan Corbet

So somebody took a couple of LWN's recent conference articles, threw them into an LLM blender with some other stuff, and produced ... this ...

https://www.webpronews.com/linux-kernels-future-tab-integrates-rust-navigates-ai-boosts-collaboration/

Google News propagates that stuff - something they have long refused to do with LWN's original material. But somehow we're supposed to continue to exist to feed material into that machine?

Sorry, having a grumpy day.
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Jonathan Corbet

I must confess I found this amusing... I don't normally look quite so psychedelic though.

https://canartuc.medium.com/linux-foundation-tab-election-jonathan-corbet-steps-down-after-18-years-80cebb9ef9f1
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Jonathan Corbet

Power is back on here. After two days without, one definitely appreciates the luxury of being able to flip on a light.

According to the official numbers, the peak wind gust in my neighborhood was 102mph. Suffice to say I didn't get my bike ride in yesterday... otherwise all seems well at this point, though.

[Now looking harder at vehicle-to-home power solutions.]
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Jonathan Corbet

Peak gust at the nearby NCAR weather station (which I helped set up nearly 30 years ago!): 88.4 m/h (140km/h). So far.

No power until 10pm tomorrow, or so the utility promises.

At least nobody seems to have set anything on fire. So far.

https://archive.eol.ucar.edu/cgi-bin/weather.cgi?site=fl&period=5-minute&units=english
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Jonathan Corbet

Why NCAR matters. The Joint Aviation Weather Studies (JAWS) project described here is one I worked on quite a bit.

https://www.rmpbs.org/blogs/science-environment/ncar-boulder-microbursts
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Jonathan Corbet

So today I learn that the National Weather Service has a "particularly dangerous situation" designation that is more severe than a red flag warning. There has never been one in Colorado -- until now.

I would have rather not learned that.
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Jonathan Corbet

Oh boy, fun times in Boulder ... >100mph winds, red-flag warnings, power failures ... for the second time this week. Not the Christmas weather we were hoping for.

https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/COBOULDER/bulletins/4009a6b
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Jonathan Corbet

I worked at NCAR for 18 years; we did a lot of research that benefited a lot of people, and I felt proud to be a part of that institution. The administration's desire to destroy it is certainly in character; we can't have leading-edge science in a country ruled by ignorance, after all. But this one hits close to home. It will take generations to recover from the damage that is being done.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/climate/national-center-for-atmospheric-research-trump.html
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Jonathan Corbet

I encountered this gathering in Japan; was really tempted to post it as another Maintainers Summit group photo but ... resisted ...
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Jonathan Corbet

So I took some grief yesterday about the "clickbait" headline on the brief Rust news I put up:

https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/

In person, though, I've gotten far more grief for adding the "(successful)" parenthetical afterward β€” folks say the original was better.

Oh well, I've learned to be more careful with headlines now.

Next article: Seven Shocking Conclusions from the Linux Plumbers Conference β€” but #4 will warm your heart.
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Jonathan Corbet

For those who are curious about tomorrow's Maintainers Summit session on machine-learning tools, Sasha Levin has put together a good summary of the state of the discussion: https://lwn.net/ml/all/aTYmE53i3FJ_lJH2@laps
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Jonathan Corbet

So it turns out that experiencing a middle-of-the-night earthquake on the 23rd floor of a Tokyo hotel is not conducive to a good night's sleep. Who knew?
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Heya, Heya!

Before the presents land under the Christmas tree, we’re super happy and honored to reveal the name of our godfather for the 2026 edition: @corbet.

Huge thanks to him for giving us a bit of his time β€” we know how precious it is.

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