@mhoye This post builds up a straw man just to set it on fire. The logos you posted are from companies that donate directly to kernel.org (not Linux Foundation). Kernel.org is a separate legal entity from Linux Foundation and is a registered charitable organization. Donating to kernel.org is tax deductible whereas contributing to the Linux Foundation isn't. These companies are gladly and willingly donating their resources to kernel.org specifically.

The companies supporting kernel.org operations are:

Akamai: provides free hosting to git.kernel.org and lore.kernel.org.
Constellix: provides free DNS hosting with failover and geoDNS.
Fastly: provides CDN services.
Servers.com: provides mirrors.kernel.org hosting (the two nodes that we currently have in operation).
Google: provides a git mirror at kernel.googlesource.com.
Red Hat: donates RHEL licenses.
Linux Foundation: employs staff operating kernel.org

The reason I'm asking for more hosting opportunities for mirrors.kernel.org is two-fold: it's a community service that hosts distros, and not so much the kernel. Providing mirroring opportunities for distros is not our primary charter -- we provide kernel archives, not distro binaries. However, we've operated mirrors.kernel.org for 30-odd years and if we stop running the service, parts of the Internet break (it's a fact). So, we continue operating it and will do so for the foreseeable future.

The second reason is because for many hosting companies it makes a lot of sense to donate hardware and bandwidth to a charitable organization like kernel.org -- for reasons of tax deductions and because it often benefits them directly (their own cloud hosting can then benefit from a tier-1 mirror in their datacentre). So, it makes commercial sense for them to donate to kernel.org as a tax write-off as opposed to for the Linux Foundation to pay for hosting, plus they get other perks, such as getting a bit of publicity, a good standing with fellow nerds, etc.

Your post is unnecessarily inflammatory and poorly informed.

@jzb I would have loved to see Pink Floyd, certainly. I did manage to catch the Talking Heads at Red Rocks many years ago ... *that* was a good show...

@luis_in_brief Said milestone was reached in December, but I'm glad the world is catching up :)

https://lwn.net/Articles/1050174/

@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...

@ayushnix The length of the paywall period has been a concern since its inception in 2002... We want to be a part of the development community, and, I fear, walling off the content for too long would interfere with that.

@JustinDerrick Good advice but inadequate. We do definitely operate that way most of the time; here I thought it was important to call out what is going on.

But if I search Google for "Linux 7.0", I see that two out of seven of the "top stories" are from that site, including the one I posted. This stuff is being strongly amplified in ways that we're not well placed to counter.

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

@ruivo Subscriptions are down a little bit (not massively) from a year ago. Determining causes is hard; I suspect that the slop flood, economic challenges, and geopolitical factors all play into it.

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?

@kernellogger @axboe See https://lwn.net/Articles/1054225/ for more information :)

@krzk @lwn As much as I sympathize with your unhappiness with the large email providers — since we run our own email, we've certainly had our challenges there too — manipulating the news in that way seems like the wrong approach to the problem. Doing such a thing even once would, I think, damage LWN's credibility badly.

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.

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.

@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.

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.

@gael @lwn https://lwn.net/Articles/1008897/ was written about a year ago, but still pretty much describes the situation.

@dfs_comedy @lwn Take a look at Bright Data's web site sometime. They advertise "automatically avoid anti-bot measures and CAPTCHAs", and "150M+ diverse IPs from real user devices". But be happy because those IPs are "100% ethically-sourced".

They aren't the only ones, and others are surely less overt about what their business is. But it would be a place to start.

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.

@lwn We're up to nearly 1.2M IPs having attacked our server today. For now we've been able to make some changes and the situation appears to have stabilized; apologies to everybody who was blocked out of the site while this was going on.

@liw @lwn Ah, so you are part of the scraper problem :)

Seriously, though, our content is CC-licensed once it escapes the paywall, so your archive is entirely authorized in truth.

Countermeasures are helping for the moment; I do not expect it to be a long-lasting thing.

Closing in on 1M unique IPs this morning. The net is broken.