Jonathan Corbet

https://social.kernel.org/users/corbet

Public Key

npub1guyhrdgjzw3fl4esdazyzf8dg0h2dg7hp043wqpw9egl0ds5ydnsckcl6w

NIP-05 Address

corbet_at_social.kernel.org@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsywzt3k5fp8g5l6ucx73zpynk58m4x50tsh6chqqhzu50hkc2zxecprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmnttucwk0

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub1guyhrdgjzw3fl4esdazyzf8dg0h2dg7hp043wqpw9egl0ds5ydnsckcl6w

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Last Notes

2026-09-08 23:03:33 UTC

The US federal government, it seems, is worried that the Chinese are engaged in "distillation" from US large language models
https://media.defense.gov/2026/Sep/08/2003992823/-1/-1/1/CSA_CHINA_BASED_AI_COMPANIES_MALICIOUS_DISTILLATION_AGAINST_US.PDF
"China-based AI companies route distillation requests through multiple pathways to gain
unauthorized access, consequently violating U.S. AI companies’ terms of use."
I'm shocked that an AI company would do such a thing. Certainly no US-based AI company would route requests through multiple paths to gain access...right...?

2026-07-30 18:29:13 UTC

Ah what a world we have built...
"In addition to enlisting the user’s TV box in ad fraud networks, these off-brand streaming devices almost universally come with residential proxy software pre-installed. This software rents the user’s Internet address out to anonymous paying customers, who run the gamut from aggressive content scraping firms to ticket scalpers and outright cybercriminals.
What’s more, because these generic (and generally dirt cheap) TV boxes are all horribly insecure by default and bereft of any kind of authentication, installing one on your home or office network only invites further mischief. In January, the proxy tracking service Synthient documented how multiple botnets had rapidly enslaved millions of TV boxes using a complex interplay of security vulnerabilities in both the residential proxy software and the streaming devices themselves."
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/07/read-this-before-you-buy-that-tv-streaming-stick/

2026-07-23 19:09:55 UTC

GrapheneOS has a "duress code" feature that will wipe the device if it is used in an attempt to unlock it. A potentially useful feature, but the US is now trying to prosecute somebody for having given the duress code to an officer demanding the unlocking of his phone.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/23/cop-city-protester-phone

2026-07-16 14:45:09 UTC

I've been spending rather too much of my time reading the depressing threads on LLM use in the kernel. But I thought that this contribution from Lyude Paul worth the investment.
"For many people who need their jobs, guidelines around acceptable use of these tools beyond "a person needs to own the the code" may end up being the only thing allowing employees to be responsible with their contributions without repercussion from employers."
https://lwn.net/ml/all/3a5d891b536588e8e4fc84d60a5c8af72091d852.camel@redhat.com

2026-06-29 15:05:19 UTC

- reply

Someday I would love to talk about them. I'm somewhat reluctant to do that now, though, at least until I've figured out what we're going to do when those strategies stop being effective.

2026-06-28 20:06:25 UTC

The @npub1nen…n3ve web site is currently under the most intense scraper attack I have seen yet. 1.3M unique IP addresses within the last couple of hours, and it's not done yet. The work we have done on defenses appears to be paying off, though; the server is holding up reasonably well — so far.
...just in case anybody wonders why I have a rather dim view of the whole AI industry...

2026-03-26 22:54:04 UTC

I see on HN that John Bradley, the creator of xv, has died:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47534086
The real announcements, alas, come from sources that I am unwilling to link to.
Xv, an image viewer/editor, is one of those tools that hit a peak of usability that really hasn't been matched since. It supports a wide range of image-manipulation functions, and has an interface that gets the job done quickly. I've sort of moved away from it over the years, but I still keep it around.
RIP, John, you made something good.

2026-03-24 19:43:38 UTC

Today I got an email from a local farm saying that they will not be doing a community supported agriculture (CSA) program this year because they don't think there will be enough water to grow food.
Need I say this is not a good sign?

2026-03-22 21:41:06 UTC

As the number of LLM-generated patches in my inbox increases, I am starting to experience the sort of maintainer stress that has long been predicted. But there's another aspect of this that has recently crossed my mind.
Just over a week ago, a new personality showed up with a whole pile of machine-generated patches claiming to fill in our memory-management documentation. A few reviewers had some sharp questions, the response to which has been ... silence. This person doesn't seem to have cared enough about that work to make an effort to get past the initial resistance.
Once upon a time, somebody who had produced many pages of MM documentation would be invested enough in that work to make at least a minimal attempt to defend it.
Kernel developers often worry that a patch submitter will not stick around to maintain the code they are trying to push upstream. Part of the gauntlet of getting kernel patches accepted can be seen as a sort of "are you serious?" test.
When somebody submits a big pile of machine-generated code, though, will they be *able* to maintain it? And will they be sufficiently invested in this code, which they didn't write and probably don't understand, to stick around and fix the inevitable problems that will arise? I rather fear not, and that does not bode well for the long-term maintainability of our software.

2026-02-26 15:01:27 UTC

"This winter wasn’t just a bit warm or slightly unusual. It was a complete failure of the cold‑season that the West depends on, and the consequences will extend far beyond a lack of snow along Colorado’s Continental Divide. When winter fails this profoundly, the disruption radiates outward through every system that relies on the steady rhythm of cold, snow, and gradual melt. Water managers lose the natural reservoir that mountain snowpack is supposed to provide, leaving cities, farms, and entire states in the Colorado River Basin facing increasingly uncomfortable decisions about how to stretch a shrinking supply. Reservoirs that should be quietly refilling through winter will instead stumble into this spring underfilled, offering far less protection against the triple punch of summer heat, irrigation demand, and wildfire suppression. Millions of Americans who depend on the Colorado River will feel the consequences of this winter long after our snow-starved peaks fade from the headlines."
https://bouldercast.com/a-complete-failure-of-winter-across-the-west-and-what-it-means-for-the-rest-of-2026/
*sigh*

2026-02-10 19:38:08 UTC

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?

2026-01-22 14:11:43 UTC

As of the last count, @npub1nen…n3ve 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.

2026-01-15 18:51:17 UTC

So @npub1nen…n3ve 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)

2025-12-09 00:38:06 UTC

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?

2025-11-25 02:44:12 UTC

In 2017 Randall Munroe posted a strip called "Seven Years" about being the caregiver for a loved one dealing with cancer:
https://xkcd.com/1928/
That strip literally made me cry, it was such a clear telling of what that experience is like; much of it could have been about my own life.
Except that my own experience had a different ending.
Today he put out "Fifteen Years":
https://xkcd.com/3172/
This one made me want to cheer. What a joy to see a story that has played out so differently, so much better. I have never crossed paths with Mr. Munroe, but I rejoice in his and his family's good fortune as if he were a good friend.
Here's to many more years.

2025-11-19 19:20:08 UTC

EFF is asking for US folks to file comments on a proposed rules change that would make killing bad patents much harder.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/patent-office-about-make-bad-patents-untouchable

2025-10-20 14:47:35 UTC

"The manufacturer had the power to remotely disable devices and used it against me for blocking their data collection."
https://codetiger.github.io/blog/the-day-my-smart-vacuum-turned-against-me/
...and people wonder why I resist having that kind of stuff in my home...

2025-09-20 15:22:07 UTC

It would appear that US folks have until Monday to provide comments on the administration's plan to say that greenhouse gasses are just fine and there is no need to try not to emit them:
https://electrek.co/2025/09/20/2-days-left-to-comment-on-epas-plan-to-raise-gas-prices-76c-gal-kill-thousands/

2025-09-09 17:23:43 UTC

...that feeling of dread that comes when your bank starts sending cheery emails about how wonderful their reimplemented app is going to be...

2025-08-06 15:22:21 UTC

So it seems that the Constitution of the United States, as posted on congress.gov, is missing a few sections, including insignificant text like "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended".
I'm sure this is just an innocent editing mistake.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/

2025-07-25 18:05:15 UTC

- reply

A lengthy article mentions the project's founder three times - doesn't seem all that focused?
I *do* get the feeling he's still the driving force behind the project; that has nothing to do with whether the development team exists.
Again, do not read things into the article that are not there. Do not create drama that does not need to exist. I *like* your project, and I wrote an article that reflects that. I'm sorry if you expected it to look like your press packet.

2025-07-25 17:18:51 UTC

- reply

OK, I'm sorry, but this is bizarre. The article is anything but negative! In what way do I question the existence of your development team? Please, look again, don't read things into it that aren't there, and don't create drama where none needs to exist.

2025-06-26 16:18:26 UTC

If you run an operation that pays freelance authors for articles, you get a *lot* of people trying to sell you the output from their slop factory of choice. These pitches far exceed the legitimate ones at this point.
Today we got a pitch for an article about the load-balancing scheduler regression caused by the sched_ext framework in the 6.11 release. Somebody has clearly put a bit more than the usual amount of attention into the sort of topic that might appeal to @lwn@fedi.lwn.net. There is only one little problem... that regression had nothing to do with sched_ext, which was merged in 6.12. The pitch was a bunch of authoritative-sounding bullshit; the article would surely have been more of the same.
Sometimes I truly lose hope about humanity's ability to keep its head above the flood of this stuff.

2025-06-19 19:40:57 UTC

The Wayback Machine managed to capture a Linux Journal article about the Arch Linux distribution's plan to switch to "rye-init" before whatever human intelligence remains there figured out that "rye-init" does not actually exist.
The Linux Journal predates LWN by some years and was, for a long time, the definitive read for Linux users. The Don Marti ( @npub1dx8…renv ) years were especially noteworthy. It is sad to see where it has ended up now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250618001301/https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/arch-linux-breaks-new-ground-official-rust-init-system-support-arrives

2025-04-07 13:50:50 UTC

20 Years ago: the BitKeeper license changed, making it unavailable for kernel development.
https://lwn.net/Articles/130746/
It drove home the perils of relying on proprietary software and spurred the creation of Git - a significant event, overall.

2025-04-01 18:58:25 UTC

- reply

See also: Vint Cerf's comments on Dave's passing: "I could not say better than Frank already has how much Dave's work has helped to improve our experience of the Internet. I can't think of anyone more dedicated to the proposition that performance counts and should be pursued with determination and vigor. I've known Dave for many years and greatly valued his counsel and technical skills - to say nothing of his healthy sense of humor. I will miss him but will be always grateful to have known him."
https://lwn.net/ml/all/CAHxHggemafY9UP6Zm3oXVWWX5Wd+ffauot5MCN-6Gv-pOx3=Sg@mail.gmail.com

2025-03-30 15:20:58 UTC

Today I got a cheery email from somebody who claims to be the "ethics and compliance" officer for a company called Bright Data. He wanted to have a "no pressure" conversation about the whole AI scraperbot problem. Looking at their web site, this company offers an API that, and I quote, "Bypasses anti-scraping mechanisms and solves CAPTCHAs, ensuring uninterrupted access to the most protected web sites".
After careful consideration for several milliseconds, I have concluded that I really don't have anything to discuss with this person.
But at least their claimed "100M+" of residential IP addresses that they use for their DDOS attacks are "ethically sourced".

2025-03-22 14:17:38 UTC

So my phone (a Pixel 7) has picked up the habit of randomly rebooting for unknown reasons. It seems to be getting worse.
Once upon a time, I used to look forward, at least a little bit, to getting a new phone. Shinier better hardware, a software update, there was something I got out of the deal, even when I wasn't really feeling that I wanted to buy another hunk of electronic stuff.
When I think of a new phone now, I think of fending of a bunch of new AI crap, of trying to track down and fix a hundred different privacy settings that, mysteriously, don't get copied from the old device, and generally just trying to get back to where I am now.
In other words, it's not that I'm not excited about getting a new phone; I actively don't want that new phone.
Maybe I'll just go back to the land line.

2025-03-12 23:28:10 UTC

Ah the memories one finds at the bottom of a desk drawer... Once upon a time this was a really cool thing.
https://media.social.kernel.org/media/144d85af8e8376c2559d43d395c2c2b81b1b6da10c24cbea51a51557577ee677.jpg

2025-02-25 15:34:18 UTC

Many cultures celebrate solar events — solstices and such — and that is a fine tradition. My variant of that is to celebrate the first day of the year when the solar panels generate more power than the house uses, running the meter backward overall. Thanks to some warm weather, that was yesterday... spring is coming!

2025-02-21 20:20:18 UTC

A pretty day in Boulder today
https://media.social.kernel.org/media/42713532e6477b0820c0b4db47a5633d6fec16a7076be0bc183c4dcd451aac83.jpg

2025-02-05 23:06:06 UTC

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/

2025-02-03 21:04:53 UTC

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?

2025-02-03 18:03:47 UTC

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.
https://media.social.kernel.org/media/019ec62b05e5f58efcc6e5f2c09103b5e90d7a6269c74b5eee969685b5a898c5.jpg
https://media.social.kernel.org/media/845f27339c40bfc474c37d350217ed01e18d77dbdc16cfc6e018e5649333cc36.jpg

2025-01-21 20:12:32 UTC

Should you be wondering why @npub16rq…egsp #LWN is occasionally sluggish... since the new year, the DDOS onslaughts from AI-scraper bots has picked up considerably. Only a small fraction of our traffic is serving actual human readers at this point. At times, some bot decides to hit us from hundreds of IP addresses at once, clogging the works. They don't identify themselves as bots, and robots.txt is the only thing they *don't* read off the site.
This is beyond unsustainable. We are going to have to put time into deploying some sort of active defenses just to keep the site online. I think I'd even rather be writing about accounting systems than dealing with this crap. And it's not just us, of course; this behavior is going to wreck the net even more than it's already wrecked.
Happy new year :)

2025-01-05 22:23:12 UTC

So is there anybody out there who can explain this image?
I bought this card in Korea some years ago after having seen this theme - a tiger and a rabbit seemingly getting stoned together - in a number of places. There must be a story behind it, but my meager search skills have never managed to turn it up. I do still love the image, though...
https://media.social.kernel.org/media/be5af378e8a538847baa411a9033bef70ccd5e36c49c5e33dc056419a083b4f2.png

2024-12-31 17:49:48 UTC

Two years ago, I installed solar panels on the roof, and was rewarded with enough power to run the house, charge the car, and even run the heat pump for much of the year.
Another reward was the SunPower monitoring system that lets us track the performance of the system and see how each individual panel is working. Naturally, this system only delivers its data to some proprietary cloud system run by SunPower. Just as naturally, SunPower has gone bankrupt, and the monitoring system is now just a useless brick sitting on the wall.
...or at least it would be, had I not gone through the effort of integrating it with Home Assistant — a mildly difficult task involving hooking into a maintenance port on the device itself. So now I have the data out of the monitoring box stored on a local system, under my control, and I don't need to go scrambling for alternatives. I can obsess over my post-solstice data, waiting for production to reach decent levels again — that happens faster if I stare at it, I'm convinced.
Maybe there's something to this free software idea after all.
https://media.social.kernel.org/media/8f8ce176f78826758b1c474838cc7901bd4cf985beabad6158f3116d4e4201d4.png

2024-12-11 20:36:57 UTC

I was digging through my bookshelves when I stumbled across this book, untouched for years.
I picked up Anybody's Bike Book sometime around the mid 1970s, after having discovered the freedom that a good bike gives to a kid who needs to move around in northern Wyoming. It taught me that there was nothing in my bike that I couldn't fix myself — an empowering lesson to learn. With a mixture of plain language, clear descriptions, and sharp humor, it was perhaps my first example of what technical documentation can be.
So, a belated "thank you" to Tom Cuthbertson for this outstanding book; there is no doubt it had a strong influence on all the words I have inflicted on the world.
https://media.social.kernel.org/media/d7f59ba4cc39fd102d780bd443348e9afdbc091faae45dbad0eca92ece344309.png

2024-12-04 18:28:32 UTC

So here is a weird one ... the LWN site has been seeing a steady stream of login attempts, all using weird yahoo addresses as the username. By "weird" I mean things like lllbnwidgqeerdyi@yahoo.com and other equally unlikely strings.
These do not correspond to LWN accounts, but somebody has looked at our login form for long enough to post the login attempts directly, without loading the form first. The attempts come from all over the Internet, suggesting that some sort of botnet is doing this.
I don't suppose anybody else has seen this sort of pattern, or has any idea what it is that they may be trying to accomplish?

2024-09-06 14:35:04 UTC

I have often complained that, even though thousands of developers are paid to work on the Linux kernel, there is not a single person whose job it is to write documentation for the kernel. The problem is wider than that, though: Alejandro Colomar, who has been maintaining the man pages collection for the last four years, can no longer afford to do it for free.
https://lwn.net/ml/all/4d7tq6a7febsoru3wjium4ekttuw2ouocv6jstdkthnacmzr6x@f2zfbe5hs7h5

2024-09-04 16:10:08 UTC

- reply

As far as I can tell, you do have an LWN subscription. I definitely encourage you to add your point of view there.
This was one of those articles where the best I can hope for is that everybody is equally mad at me... can I go write about memory tiering now?

2024-09-03 16:45:07 UTC

The more I dig through kernel mailing list discussions, the more I think that we would do well to end the use of "NAK" entirely. It is an exercise of power that is hurtful to read and gets in the way of an actual discussion of how a patch needs to be improved. I have, in my maintainer role, never said "NAK" to a patch and plan to continue that way.