Jonathan Corbet
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
@Edent 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.
There are plenty of problems in kernelland, but they will not be improved by a distorted view like this.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
On the radar: should there be an OpenWrt Two router device?
https://lwn.net/ml/all/56022ffa-2e71-4335-ae3c-418552e7e088@phrozen.org
...as if anybody is going to say "no"...
https://lwn.net/ml/all/56022ffa-2e71-4335-ae3c-418552e7e088@phrozen.org
...as if anybody is going to say "no"...
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
US politics
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So NOAA employees have been told to stop working with foreign nationals
https://www.wired.com/story/noaa-employees-foreign-nationals/
Before I bailed out of reality to get into this free-software adventure, I spent many years at the National Center for Atmospheric Research; it was a great time working on things that really mattered. One of the things I learned is that atmospheric science is an international exercise; international collaboration is the norm. Removing the US from that community will impede science worldwide, and deprive the US of the fruits of working with others. Many of the best researchers in this field are *not* in the US.
But something else crosses my mind. If they can kill scientific collaboration, they can go after other types of collaboration too. Like, say, ordering government agencies to stop participating in free-software projects where there are non-US developers present — all of them, in other words. Or telling government contractors that. An attempt to tear our community apart is not much of a stretch from where we are now.
We live in interesting times, alas.
https://www.wired.com/story/noaa-employees-foreign-nationals/
Before I bailed out of reality to get into this free-software adventure, I spent many years at the National Center for Atmospheric Research; it was a great time working on things that really mattered. One of the things I learned is that atmospheric science is an international exercise; international collaboration is the norm. Removing the US from that community will impede science worldwide, and deprive the US of the fruits of working with others. Many of the best researchers in this field are *not* in the US.
But something else crosses my mind. If they can kill scientific collaboration, they can go after other types of collaboration too. Like, say, ordering government agencies to stop participating in free-software projects where there are non-US developers present — all of them, in other words. Or telling government contractors that. An attempt to tear our community apart is not much of a stretch from where we are now.
We live in interesting times, alas.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
US politics
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A strident look at what is going on in this country, worth a read. Wish I knew better what to do about it...
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/05/the-24-hour-reality-check-musks-impossible-power-grab-and-americas-crisis/
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/05/the-24-hour-reality-check-musks-impossible-power-grab-and-americas-crisis/
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
@kees @securepaul @monsieuricon @jmorris I have found them to be really useful when, for whatever reason, the automatic renewal process breaks and the cert heads toward expiration. Maybe I'm just clumsy, but I have managed to break it a time or two without noticing.
Yes, we should just have some sort of monitoring of our own ... that's gonna be happening soon ...
Yes, we should just have some sort of monitoring of our own ... that's gonna be happening soon ...
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
Forbes is warning us that Android phones are under severe risk due to a kernel vulnerability:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/02/03/google-warns-all-android-users-your-phone-is-now-at-risk/
This comes from Google's Android security bulletin for February:
https://source.android.com/docs/security/bulletin/2025-02-01
...which informs us that "There are indications that CVE-2024-53104 may be under limited, targeted exploitation". The vulnerability in question, though, is CVE-2024-53104:
https://lwn.net/ml/all/2024120232-CVE-2024-53104-d781@gregkh
...which is in the uvcvideo camera driver. Either I'm missing something badly, or the only way to exploit this would be to plug a malicious camera device into the phone. I can see why they would want to fix this, but I'm not sure it's a red-alert situation for most of us?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/02/03/google-warns-all-android-users-your-phone-is-now-at-risk/
This comes from Google's Android security bulletin for February:
https://source.android.com/docs/security/bulletin/2025-02-01
...which informs us that "There are indications that CVE-2024-53104 may be under limited, targeted exploitation". The vulnerability in question, though, is CVE-2024-53104:
https://lwn.net/ml/all/2024120232-CVE-2024-53104-d781@gregkh
...which is in the uvcvideo camera driver. Either I'm missing something badly, or the only way to exploit this would be to plug a malicious camera device into the phone. I can see why they would want to fix this, but I'm not sure it's a red-alert situation for most of us?
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
A week ago we managed to get away for a few days to Capitol Reef National Park — definitely worth exploring. It's important to escape to a beautiful place with no network service every now and then.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
@keira_reckons Honestly I don't think it's just a matter of "people who make poor decisions". We have created a world where thousands of predatory people have free rein to try to rip us off every day, and some of them are good at it. I'm pretty aware of such things (I think), but it still feels like it's only a matter of time until I have a bad day and get scammed somehow.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
@mcdanlj @LWN What a lot of people are suggesting (nepethenes and such) will work great against a single abusive robot. None of it will help much when tens of thousands of sites are grabbing a few URLs each. Most of them will never step into the honeypot, and the ones that do will not be seen again regardless.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
@penguin42 They don't tell me what they are doing with the data... the distributed scraping is an easily observable fact, though. Perhaps they are firehosing the data back to the mothership for training?
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
@smxi @monsieuricon Suggestions for these countermeasures - and how to apply them without hosing legitimate users - would be much appreciated. I'm glad they are obvious to you, please do share!
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
So I guess I'm famous now :)
https://www.heise.de/en/news/AI-bots-paralyze-Linux-news-site-and-others-10252162.html
To be clear, LWN has never "crashed" as a result of this onslaught. We'll not talk about what happened after I pushed up some code trying to address it...
Most seriously, though: I'm surprised that this situation is surprising to anybody at this point. This is a net-wide problem, it surely is not limited to free-software-oriented sites. But if the problem is starting to get wider attention, that is fine with me...
https://www.heise.de/en/news/AI-bots-paralyze-Linux-news-site-and-others-10252162.html
To be clear, LWN has never "crashed" as a result of this onslaught. We'll not talk about what happened after I pushed up some code trying to address it...
Most seriously, though: I'm surprised that this situation is surprising to anybody at this point. This is a net-wide problem, it surely is not limited to free-software-oriented sites. But if the problem is starting to get wider attention, that is fine with me...
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
A followup for folks who are curious about the whole AI botswarm problem...
Some of these bots are clearly running on a bunch of machines on the same net. I have been able to reduce the traffic significantly by treating everything as a class-C net and doing subnet-level throttling. That and simply blocking a couple of them.
But that leaves a lot of traffic with an interesting characteristic: there are millions of obvious bot hits (following a pattern through the site, for example) that all come from a different IP. An access log with 9M lines as over 1M IP addresses, and few of them appear more than about three times.
So these things are running on widely distributed botnets, likely on compromised computers, and they are doing their best to evade any sort of recognition or throttling. I don't think that any sort of throttling or database of known-bot IPs is going to help here...not quite sure what to do about it.
What a world we have made for ourselves...
Some of these bots are clearly running on a bunch of machines on the same net. I have been able to reduce the traffic significantly by treating everything as a class-C net and doing subnet-level throttling. That and simply blocking a couple of them.
But that leaves a lot of traffic with an interesting characteristic: there are millions of obvious bot hits (following a pattern through the site, for example) that all come from a different IP. An access log with 9M lines as over 1M IP addresses, and few of them appear more than about three times.
So these things are running on widely distributed botnets, likely on compromised computers, and they are doing their best to evade any sort of recognition or throttling. I don't think that any sort of throttling or database of known-bot IPs is going to help here...not quite sure what to do about it.
What a world we have made for ourselves...
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
@AndresFreundTec @LWN Yes, a lot of really silly traffic. About 1/3 of it results in redirects from bots hitting port 80; you don't see them coming back with TLS, they just keep pounding their head against the same wall.
It is weird; somebody has clearly put some thought into creating a distributed source of traffic that avoid tripping the per-IP circuit breakers. But the rest of it is brainless.
It is weird; somebody has clearly put some thought into creating a distributed source of traffic that avoid tripping the per-IP circuit breakers. But the rest of it is brainless.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
@RonnyAdsetts @LWN The user agent field is pure fiction for most of this traffic.
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