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Jonathan Corbet

This year's COVID vaccine is coming out in the US. Just booked my appointment so I can get jabbed ahead of the fall travel nightmare.
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@evan We (LWN - @LWN) maintain an events calendar at https://lwn.net/Calendar/, with an associated call-for-proposals calendar at https://lwn.net/Calendar/Monthly/cfp/ . We're focused on the Linux and free-software worlds, but try to be fairly comprehensive within it.
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Jonathan Corbet

If you want to know where the action is in a wildfire, just follow the aircraft. I'm supposed to be getting work done, but its hard, especially when they keep flying over my house.

Hopefully they are starting to get a handle on some of these.
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Jonathan Corbet

So there are fires burning up and down the Colorado front range. At least one person has died already. The air inside the house makes my eyes burn. It seems like a good time to be careful.

There are people seriously talking about the possibility of a serial arsonist setting these things off. But, then, some idiots decided that last night would be a good time to go play with fireworks above town and duly set another one. I guess we should not attribute to malice that which can be explained by appalling stupidity.
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@basha Most of the crawlers do not even identify themselves as such; they will not consult the robots.txt file. There are no solutions to be found there, unfortunately.
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Jonathan Corbet

There are now two fires visible from my house... Slurry bombers overhead. Still a tiny problem compared to what some others are dealing with, but still... this sucks.
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Jonathan Corbet

I went to Jasper many years ago and thought it was an amazing place; I've always intended to get back there. Not this year, I guess.

This sucks; we are losing our treasures.

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/25/nx-s1-5052037/jasper-alberta-canada-wildfire
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@krans I think it would be a terrible mistake for LWN to do that. LWN is part of the history of the community; walling that off would damage both LWN and (I like to think, at least) the community badly.
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@mcdanlj I've attempted such things, but the problem with playing whac-a-mole games is that there is an infinite supply of moles. I've found I can block a lot of subnets and not really make a dent in the problem.

I've started to wonder if some of these people aren't renting botnets to get around blocking, rate limiting, and other defenses.
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Jonathan Corbet

The amount of LWN traffic that is just AI bots downloading the same stuff over and over again is staggering; it's increasingly hard to see any sort of human signal in there at all. Something is going to give here at some point...

https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse/
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@gnomon Replacing URLs isn't that hard, whether there's hundreds of them or thousands - a properly written script doesn't care.

I mentioned lore (and the LWN mailing-list archive) in particular because they are based on public-inbox. That is a great piece of software, but it has some interesting design decisions. Behind public-inbox is a Git repository with a single file called "m". Each message added to the archive goes in as a patch to "m". A mailing-list archive is a long series of Git commits to that one file.

What this means is that changing a message in the archive comes down to a rebase operation. Lots of fun in an archive with millions of messages (and thus millions of commits to rebase) in it. It's doable, but it's not fast or easy. It's not what public-inbox was designed to do. Archived emails aren't meant to change.

Changing URLs in an email will also mess with things like DKIM validation, of course.

This is why I think it's unlikely that the linux-kernel archive (or the LWN archive) will be patched; it's a massive job. But perhaps @monsieuricon has a different view of things...?
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@vegard Better but still really painful to fix; public-inbox is pretty firmly built around the idea that archived messages do not change.
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@albertcardona I am thinking about hacking together a URL-replacement script for LWN. Doing that on lore, though (or the LWN email archive) would be a rather more painful prospect, to say the least. I would honestly be surprised if it actually got done.
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Jonathan Corbet

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.
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Jonathan Corbet

"To better understand how the kernel community views Rust,
we collect the posts about writing Rust drivers from lwn and
ycombinator until 2023/08/05, and use Chatgpt to analyze
them."

I guess that's research in the 2020s... https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc24/presentation/li-hongyu
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Jonathan Corbet

Finally managed to ride the Medicine Bow rail trail in Wyoming - definitely worth it!
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@gnomon @LWN @jzb I've fixed these, thanks, but that happened by chance. Mastodon is a poor way to report typos in LWN articles; email to lwn@lwn.net is, instead, sure to be seen by somebody.
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@cesarb Interesting...the link still works fine for me...
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Jonathan Corbet

The end of support for CentOS 7 has gotten a lot of attention — and perhaps caught a lot of people off-guard. But yesterday was also the EOL for Scientific Linux, which is kind of the end of an era. Scientific Linux was the main alternative to CentOS back in the day, and was widely used. FNAL got out of the distribution business and never put out a RHEL 8 clone, so Scientific Linux is now entirely gone. Thanks to FNAL for having supported such a useful distribution for so long!

https://scientificlinux.org/
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Jonathan Corbet

I've worked in technology for decades, and am as fond as a nice gadget as any other ... and I like to see Linux everywhere ... but, somehow, a bed that one has to physically hack into to gain root access, and which as a backdoor providing remote shell access to the vendor is a step or three too far...

https://dillan.org/articles/how-to-get-root-access-to-your-sleep-number-bed
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