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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

Reply to @dmarti@federate.social
@dmarti @jzb That is indeed an interesting thought. Of course, there's more than just Bright Data out there... Another idea might be an app you could put on a phone that would tell you how much your device is being used to attack others.
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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @trademark@fosstodon.org
@trademark CPU primarily when things get really crazy. More CPU is easily arranged, of course, but it is irritating as hell to have to pay for that to feed our hard-written articles to those people.
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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @trademark@fosstodon.org
@trademark Making things worse for real users is something we have gone far out of our way to avoid. I'm not sure that sharding in that way would help much, though; cache isn't really the problem.
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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @jani@floss.social
@jani @lwn @suihkulokki Suggestions are much appreciated! It's not as if we've figured all this stuff out...
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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @jani@floss.social
@jani @lwn @suihkulokki Such things have crossed our minds, certainly. The gotcha there is that we've already had troubles with bots creating accounts; I don't think they would hesitate to do more of that if that would improve their access.

That and, of course, the fact that everybody starts as an unregistered user. As long as we can avoid making the experience worse for them, I think we should.
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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to
@suihkulokki @lwn The problem with that solution is that it may well make it harder for us to bring in new subscribers, which is something we definitely want to do. First impressions matter, so giving new folks a poor experience seems ... not great.

It may yet come to that, though.
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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
@bert_hubert @lwn Today's attack on LWN was a good 250K addresses. Gotta download all those articles from 2010, just in case they changed somehow...

Something has to be done about this, but I sure don't know what. They are using other people's devices, so they don't really care about burning some CPU time on Anubis challenges - and they have evidently learned to do that.

Sometimes I think we need to just toss the net and start over.
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Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @foxylad@mastodon.nz
@foxylad @lwn There is no way to know who is after the data. The actual attack is likely perpetrated by Bright Data or one of its equally vile competitors.
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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

Reply to @ljs@mastodonapp.uk
@ljs Dunno, you have to get past the docs maintainer ... but more to the point, why is he calling you a toady? :)
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Jonathan Corbet

We're definitely winning now...

https://electrek.co/2025/12/31/energy-dept-orders-colorado-to-waste-millions-to-reopen-a-dead-coal-plant/
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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

Reply to @mackaj@mastodon.me.uk
@mackaj Less structural damage than you might think. High winds are not all that unusual here, so the building codes have them in mind. The real problem this time around was the combination with extreme fire danger; happily we seem to have dodged that bullet for the moment.
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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

Reply to @dentangle@chaos.social
@dentangle "Lashed to the keyboard" sounds an awful lot like my normal state anyway...
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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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