Somebody is spamming kernel mailing lists under the name Marian Corcodel with a 26 MByte message multiple times per day containing a collection of nonsensical patches. Looks AI-generated, perhaps with the intention to poison LLMs. This has been going on for a few days now.
I'd warn HN users not to click on that link simply because it will load a 26Mb message that will likely cause quite a strain on kernel.org's servers if everyone here does it.
I was curious how much of an impact HN could have. Napkin math:
HN gets 24M views a day. Assume those views are evenly distributed across the front page (they aren’t), and that’s about 1M views for each front page post, assuming each user clicks on one post.
By the rule of 10s (also not exact), there are 10x less views on comment threads. So assume around 100k views on a comment thread as a theoretical average.
If everyone in this thread clicked on the link, that would be 2.6 TB of transfer across the day. But by the rule of 10’s we have to assume 10x fewer people will interact (upvote, click, anything) than view. So we’re down to 260GB transfer over the course of a day.
I wonder how close that is. It seems plausible that a link in the top comment of a thread could garner 10,000 clicks.
That’s still about one click every 8 seconds, which at 10Mbit/s would indeed overwhelm the server by a factor of about 2.5x. But I clicked through and it loaded in just a few seconds, so presumably the pipe is faster than 10Mbit/s.
Another caveat is that many websites are already several megabytes, so it seems strange that 26Mb would be the breaking point for a reasonable web host.
IA's infra is slightly better for big loads though, they tend to just have higher latency rather than aborted/timed out requests, for better or worse. It can be bit slow, but as long as you're ready to wait, you'll eventually get the response. Usually hosts just cut you off with a hardcoded timeout instead, which for people on high latency/low bandwidth connections can be super fun.
Does a 26MB message actually cause noticeable strain on the server much beyond loading the page? I would think serving a contiguous 26MB chunk would be relatively similar to say 20 normal sized messages.
Actual context: Linux 7.1-rc4 release, Linus remarked on a specific documentation change.
The Register somehow turned this into an "article" that says a lot less with roughly the same number of words, and provides "context" by linking to a number of unrelated articles.
"Torvalds' remarks contrast with recent comments from fellow kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, who recently told The Register that AI has become an increasingly useful tool for the FOSS community."
Does it? Both points can be true at the same time.
“AI tools are great, but only if they actually help, rather than cause unnecessary pain and pointless make-believe work,” he wrote. “Feel free to use them, but use them in a way that is productive and makes for a better experience.”
So I think the closing remark from the register isn’t really appropriate given the context from the quotes they pulled.
the problem here is that many of the submissions are not "make-believe work" but actual existing security issues
it's just that in the past people most times didn't find security vulnerabilities independently of each other without knowing about the others en mass
worse it's non trivial to dedup on the submitter side, nor on the receiver site (as long as we stay with a classical mailing list format)
and while this might be fixable with an AI auto grouping duplicates etc. getting that right is _hard_ especially if we consider that there can be a lot to gain for an adversary to use prompt injection and similar to cause an effective "hiding" of "useful" security issues (e.g. by wrongly causing them being labeling as duplicate).
In addition to all the technical problems this causes some other problems: 1.) additional cost you can intentional (maliciously) increase 2.) dependence on some LLM provider 3.) trust problem wrt. the used LLM provider. Some of this can be avoided by running open models on sponsored owned hardware, but at the cost of often outdated LLM tech, higher cost, now needing to maintain additional hardware etc.
I will argue that ON AVERAGE, humans are lazy, and will use LLMs to generate walls of text and code. We like the easy way out - just pop a pill. Here we have a technology that can finally help us manage the crippling firehose of data, and instead, we are going to make it much worse. As expected.
A few of us will actually use these tools to reduce toil and achieve something useful.
I mean, they are two (of many) contrasting results of AI. The writer didn't say "contradict". But I agree they probably could have chosen better wording.
Will never understand why some people prefer mailing lists to do development, it always feels like the most convoluted way to hold a discussion, especially if there are multiple topics at the same time.
It probably doesn't really change that much in this scenario but with a forum or any other topics-based platform you can at least just close and ignore these things without it affecting everyone else.
A good mailclient allows a skilled user a much more efficient communication than most forums.
> It probably doesn't really change that much in this scenario but with a forum or any other topics-based platform you can at least just close and ignore these things without it affecting everyone else.
True, external moderation is a benefit of centralized platforms, but a mailclient allows personalized moderation, which allows with a well organized list to only filter out anything you are not interested in. Usenet had the benefit of both, a centralized platform with moderation, and powerful clients for further personalization. Too bad it died for most usages.
Show me a forum or topics based platform that handle threads as good as proper mail clients? Don’t mistake the poor HTML view for how managing threads with thousands of replies look like.
Local filtering is the key to ignoring threads you are not interested in. Depending on the client with 2 or 3 keystrokes you are ignoring the whole thread or this particular sub branch of it and automatically jumping to the next interesting, unread message.
This is the reason behind essentially every reply I've ever seen to this question.
"I like it this way because it's always been this way and once you change your entire email workflow and customize your email client, it's almost as good as PHPbb"
Forums are built for threads and are immediately visible and accessible for everyone, not just people who want to spend their limited time dicking with email clients.
Mailing lists are the proto-discord: knowledge locked away from the public behind a special frontend and elitist attitudes. It's only better because the list is technically visible, but only in the worst, most low-effort way possible. You dump a raw txt copy of the entire thread unstructured onto the user and make it their problem to figure out. After all, your email client makes it easy to read, so why should you care about what anyone else needs?
maybe the old tools are prevailing for a good reason.
I prefer people to email me because half of the time they figure out their problems while writing them.
it's not an absolute rule but people who don't do their homework gravitate towards calls and messaging because they just don't prepare their questions.
asynchronous communication puts the burden on the sender, where it belongs.
I think it's time the report-only intake should stop. If a reporter can't reproduce at least one use case or can't summarise it in two sentences, it should be classified as spam. LLMs write beautiful reports, it's just that sometimes it doesn't bear anything resembling the truth.
couldn't an llm be used for verification like we're seeing some OSS projects do? Some projects are moving so fast, its almost certain there's little human involvement.
It seems like LLMs are actually pretty good at the sorts of things needed to manage a high-volume mailing list (summarizing, looking for dupes, sentiment, flagging things, etc), even if only as augmentation for human eyes.
That said, I get why this would rankle a lot of the folks involved.
That's just a security/protection racket with extra steps: "Someone is paying us to hurt your business/site; pay us money to defend your site against our attacks".
I like to imagine that LLM's ability to optimize code is like an extension of the training-loop in deep learning. The loss function is some kind of metric representing security and/or performance (or the lack of it) of the code and we use the LLM as the gradient/diff generator to iterate in batches over the code and fine tune it.
Imagine the current state being for the most part a collection of local maxima in security. To push the system in a more optimal state, you either need skilled people and time to overcome the barrier to a new local maximum or you throw AI at it and evaluate whether you land in a more optimal state.
I think after some time of turbulent exploit/patch cycles we will reach a stable state again, where the code converges against a new local minimum that even with AI requires significant effort (time and tokens) to overcome. Or ideally a global maximum.
With time, the LLMs improve, so the diffs/gradients get better and we will be able to reach optimal points for any software faster.
My problem with the idea is that apparently it is assumed that OSS contributors and especially maintainers will generously donate their time to get this machinery into a state that makes the optimization loop work well - just for the AI labs to turn around and sell access to the optimized models for increasingly larger amounts of money.
AI generated code can be great. Hand rolled code can be bad. The rules are the same in both cases. Make sure your code changes are focused (no random changes just because you happen to be in the file/dir or notice something) and make sure you don't break anything else along the way.
I think this will sort itself out over time, as people realise that it’s no longer impressive whatsoever to land an AI-assisted PR to the Linux kernel.
An open visibility tracker would be a goldmine for finding new exploits before a fix is even available.
From what I’ve seen many of the AI bug search operators are newer to security research. They’re burning their tokens trying to find kernel bugs as their claim to fame before other people with AI tools find them first. They don’t spend time de-duplicating their own bugs.
Some of them may not be coming from real people. There are honeypot repos that are entirely fake and only have folders of simple files with clear security problems. They collect automated reports they get from all of the AI bots that people are running.
The issue highlighted in Linus's message isn't that the LLM is hallucinating fake bugs; it's that 100 people running the same LLM on the same codebase find the same real bug 100 times, and if they all send it to the private security mailing list, it's (1) unmanageably high volume and (2) stupid security theater [because by definition any bad actor with the same LLM would find that bug — it's effectively public at that point].
If the AI is awesome at identifying security bugs in the linux kernel, it likely can also identify if the thing it's found is similar to something that is already found in the security mailing list?
Or, put another way -- what flags the duplicate? The filer or the system? If my cheese factory is measured by the volume of cheese instead of the quality, I'll churn out the cheese even if it's sloppy duplicated cheese. And that is the case if a person has to flag a new ticket as "same as this" or not.
What's that law that says that any sufficiently large problem turns into a moderation problem?
The problem is that the tech companies are paying their research/marketing departments for headlines that go "Researcher uses powerful new Saga 6.2 release to find 597 kernel vulnerabilities! (Can your company afford NOT getting their $1000/month subscription?)", not for headlines that go "Researcher spends $50.000 to find 597 bugs, then spends $25.000 figuring out 540 of them are duplicates".
Unless the kernel community starts banning & publicly shaming repeat offenders, there's zero incentive for them to put any effort in filtering out duplicates. They are mostly doing it for marketing after all, not out of a genuine interest in making the kernel better.
> “AI detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved – and only makes that duplication worse because the reporters can't even see each other's reports.”
Ah; so it _is_ a tool problem. It is _also_ a moderation problem.
One could ban orgs that flood the zone with AI generated trash, but is there some potential middle ground where there are sets of filters to identify duplicated bugs, and possibly just internally dump "AI spam" to a lower queue?
This seems like the sort of problem I'd addressed in the 90s with killfiles and spamassassin. In other words, can't the ingestion just go through some filters to shield the humans at the end of the pipe?
And with a mailing list you don't even have to do that! The problem doesn't really change, because you have to figure out whether it is a duplicate before you can mark it as duplicate, and that's the 'managing' part of 'unmanageable'.
The problem is people trying to get individual credit for merely running a script that spams a mailing list. Many of those people are likely not even C programmers or programmers at all.
Without the immense personal reward and recognition and job offers as a motivation, the problem will disappear.
The problem will also disappear with time as the people lauding and celebrating and hiring security researchers of the past will quickly abandon LLM generated spam as a positive signal; running a prompt that sends spam is, if anything, a strong negative indicator of infosec ability and skill.
LLMs are a tool. Like all tools, most people can't or won't use them responsibly or profitably although they are useful in the correct hands.
> Torvalds' remarks contrast with recent comments from fellow kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, who recently told The Register that AI has become an increasingly useful tool for the FOSS community
Thats kinda a misrepresentation. They are talking about two different things. Linus is trying to point out incorrect use of a tool while GKH is praising a correct use. This sentence felt weird at the end of the article, kind like rage bait. And I took it :P.
So ... first, AI slop is killing mankind slowly. Skynet is winning here.
On the other hand ... IF the bug report is real, and let's assume that AI slop reports at the least a few bugs that are indeed real, then I really think it should not make a difference WHO or WHAT reports these bugs. I would not disagree on fake bugs or bogus bug reports wasting time of humans, but this is a quality difference then. Surely people can tweak AI models to be better at finding bugs too. Besides, they should auto-fix that. Is AI still too stupid to fully replace humans? Other than killing them with spam, as it does right now.
I'd really like maintainers to get their hands dirty with AI agents as well to help speed up the reviews.
Over the last year there have been way too many stories and Twitter posts like these.
Yes, maintainers are overloaded, but that's only because we haven't yet built the tools to support them.
Other than such statements, I would, as a builder like to hear the sorts of tools and requirements maintainers are looking for which would make their work easier!
I'm confused by your answer, the previous post doesn't seem to be about vibe-coding at all.
It seems to be more about:
1. auto grouping duplicate security reports
2. auto validating if they are likely viable or likely nonsense
3. auto checking if they have recently been patched
4. auto assessing if they likely "invalide" for other reasons (e.g. they are for a very old long time no longer maintained Linux version, out of tree drivers, etc.)
I mean practically all of that isn't trivial to get working in a way appropriate for the Linux security mailing list and comes with many not so obvious complications. But also non of that is vibe coding and in most cases this is is more about AI doing a per-assemsment of send security issues to speed up the review of them, then it is about the AI doing the final decision.
At the end of the day, we would rather have a more stable and bug-free kernel than not.
It's not that much work for me anymore to report and even fix that obscure monitor driver bug that sometimes causes my machine to bootloop, unless I boot without graphics and start the XOrg server manually.
I often find myself surprised at how easily frontier models are able to find bugs across abstraction layers, that only original authors can comprehend. We need more positivity around these contributions as well.
Fun fact (or not so fun if you're a subscriber):
Somebody is spamming kernel mailing lists under the name Marian Corcodel with a 26 MByte message multiple times per day containing a collection of nonsensical patches. Looks AI-generated, perhaps with the intention to poison LLMs. This has been going on for a few days now.
https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAGg4U=GNtCObd_Nbm_1Rr5FEvPb69Yz...
I'd warn HN users not to click on that link simply because it will load a 26Mb message that will likely cause quite a strain on kernel.org's servers if everyone here does it.
I was curious how much of an impact HN could have. Napkin math:
HN gets 24M views a day. Assume those views are evenly distributed across the front page (they aren’t), and that’s about 1M views for each front page post, assuming each user clicks on one post.
By the rule of 10s (also not exact), there are 10x less views on comment threads. So assume around 100k views on a comment thread as a theoretical average.
If everyone in this thread clicked on the link, that would be 2.6 TB of transfer across the day. But by the rule of 10’s we have to assume 10x fewer people will interact (upvote, click, anything) than view. So we’re down to 260GB transfer over the course of a day.
I wonder how close that is. It seems plausible that a link in the top comment of a thread could garner 10,000 clicks.
That’s still about one click every 8 seconds, which at 10Mbit/s would indeed overwhelm the server by a factor of about 2.5x. But I clicked through and it loaded in just a few seconds, so presumably the pipe is faster than 10Mbit/s.
Another caveat is that many websites are already several megabytes, so it seems strange that 26Mb would be the breaking point for a reasonable web host.
[delayed]
Plenty of people deliberately posting to HN have their servers overwhelmed.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260518134447/https://lore.kern...
I don't think needlessly straining the Internet Archive's servers is any better.
IA's infra is slightly better for big loads though, they tend to just have higher latency rather than aborted/timed out requests, for better or worse. It can be bit slow, but as long as you're ready to wait, you'll eventually get the response. Usually hosts just cut you off with a hardcoded timeout instead, which for people on high latency/low bandwidth connections can be super fun.
Will clicking on this link download a 26MB message putting extra load on archive.org's servers?
Does a 26MB message actually cause noticeable strain on the server much beyond loading the page? I would think serving a contiguous 26MB chunk would be relatively similar to say 20 normal sized messages.
Thank you for the warning. I rarely click on links these days though; only exception I make for HN links for main articles.
How do you navigate the web, everything is CTRL+L then manually type the address, or you have some fancier solution?
the web is useless outside of hn
> perhaps with the intention to poison LLMs
How does that work?
This is just nonsensical changes and slurs, but particularly degenerate input data can cause big issues in training:
https://x.com/gabriberton/status/2051873677998956851
Here's the actual mailing list post: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wi+JvcuKF2NaD_rGiYrwkR6rx...
Actual context: Linux 7.1-rc4 release, Linus remarked on a specific documentation change.
The Register somehow turned this into an "article" that says a lot less with roughly the same number of words, and provides "context" by linking to a number of unrelated articles.
here is what seems to be the relevant documentation: https://docs.kernel.org/process/security-bugs.html
see "If you resorted to AI assistance to identify a bug, you must treat it as public." and https://docs.kernel.org/process/security-bugs.html#responsib...
"Torvalds' remarks contrast with recent comments from fellow kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, who recently told The Register that AI has become an increasingly useful tool for the FOSS community."
Does it? Both points can be true at the same time.
Linus also said
“AI tools are great, but only if they actually help, rather than cause unnecessary pain and pointless make-believe work,” he wrote. “Feel free to use them, but use them in a way that is productive and makes for a better experience.”
So I think the closing remark from the register isn’t really appropriate given the context from the quotes they pulled.
the problem here is that many of the submissions are not "make-believe work" but actual existing security issues
it's just that in the past people most times didn't find security vulnerabilities independently of each other without knowing about the others en mass
worse it's non trivial to dedup on the submitter side, nor on the receiver site (as long as we stay with a classical mailing list format)
and while this might be fixable with an AI auto grouping duplicates etc. getting that right is _hard_ especially if we consider that there can be a lot to gain for an adversary to use prompt injection and similar to cause an effective "hiding" of "useful" security issues (e.g. by wrongly causing them being labeling as duplicate).
In addition to all the technical problems this causes some other problems: 1.) additional cost you can intentional (maliciously) increase 2.) dependence on some LLM provider 3.) trust problem wrt. the used LLM provider. Some of this can be avoided by running open models on sponsored owned hardware, but at the cost of often outdated LLM tech, higher cost, now needing to maintain additional hardware etc.
I will argue that ON AVERAGE, humans are lazy, and will use LLMs to generate walls of text and code. We like the easy way out - just pop a pill. Here we have a technology that can finally help us manage the crippling firehose of data, and instead, we are going to make it much worse. As expected.
A few of us will actually use these tools to reduce toil and achieve something useful.
Torvalds didn't say AI isn't useful. He is saying everybody use AI to file same duplicate bug report causing extra churn.
AI can amplify your intelligence just as easily as it can amplify your stupidity. All while telling you how smart and brilliant you are.
I mean, they are two (of many) contrasting results of AI. The writer didn't say "contradict". But I agree they probably could have chosen better wording.
Will never understand why some people prefer mailing lists to do development, it always feels like the most convoluted way to hold a discussion, especially if there are multiple topics at the same time.
It probably doesn't really change that much in this scenario but with a forum or any other topics-based platform you can at least just close and ignore these things without it affecting everyone else.
A good mailclient allows a skilled user a much more efficient communication than most forums.
> It probably doesn't really change that much in this scenario but with a forum or any other topics-based platform you can at least just close and ignore these things without it affecting everyone else.
True, external moderation is a benefit of centralized platforms, but a mailclient allows personalized moderation, which allows with a well organized list to only filter out anything you are not interested in. Usenet had the benefit of both, a centralized platform with moderation, and powerful clients for further personalization. Too bad it died for most usages.
Is there a demo of such communication on YouTube, or at least some article with screenshots?
Because it is an open and widely distributed system that is difficult to take down or otherwise have an extended outage.
Show me a forum or topics based platform that handle threads as good as proper mail clients? Don’t mistake the poor HTML view for how managing threads with thousands of replies look like.
Local filtering is the key to ignoring threads you are not interested in. Depending on the client with 2 or 3 keystrokes you are ignoring the whole thread or this particular sub branch of it and automatically jumping to the next interesting, unread message.
old people like the old tools that they grew up using
This is the reason behind essentially every reply I've ever seen to this question.
"I like it this way because it's always been this way and once you change your entire email workflow and customize your email client, it's almost as good as PHPbb"
Forums are built for threads and are immediately visible and accessible for everyone, not just people who want to spend their limited time dicking with email clients.
Mailing lists are the proto-discord: knowledge locked away from the public behind a special frontend and elitist attitudes. It's only better because the list is technically visible, but only in the worst, most low-effort way possible. You dump a raw txt copy of the entire thread unstructured onto the user and make it their problem to figure out. After all, your email client makes it easy to read, so why should you care about what anyone else needs?
maybe the old tools are prevailing for a good reason.
I prefer people to email me because half of the time they figure out their problems while writing them.
it's not an absolute rule but people who don't do their homework gravitate towards calls and messaging because they just don't prepare their questions.
asynchronous communication puts the burden on the sender, where it belongs.
I think it's time the report-only intake should stop. If a reporter can't reproduce at least one use case or can't summarise it in two sentences, it should be classified as spam. LLMs write beautiful reports, it's just that sometimes it doesn't bear anything resembling the truth.
couldn't an llm be used for verification like we're seeing some OSS projects do? Some projects are moving so fast, its almost certain there's little human involvement.
At my job, multiple people have vibe-coded bug-triage utilities. They're great for grouping duplicates.
But now we need an AI tool to consolidate the triage utilities.
It seems like LLMs are actually pretty good at the sorts of things needed to manage a high-volume mailing list (summarizing, looking for dupes, sentiment, flagging things, etc), even if only as augmentation for human eyes.
That said, I get why this would rankle a lot of the folks involved.
That's just a security/protection racket with extra steps: "Someone is paying us to hurt your business/site; pay us money to defend your site against our attacks".
AI (read: LLM technology) is the most powerful spam weapon ever invented.
I like to imagine that LLM's ability to optimize code is like an extension of the training-loop in deep learning. The loss function is some kind of metric representing security and/or performance (or the lack of it) of the code and we use the LLM as the gradient/diff generator to iterate in batches over the code and fine tune it.
Imagine the current state being for the most part a collection of local maxima in security. To push the system in a more optimal state, you either need skilled people and time to overcome the barrier to a new local maximum or you throw AI at it and evaluate whether you land in a more optimal state.
I think after some time of turbulent exploit/patch cycles we will reach a stable state again, where the code converges against a new local minimum that even with AI requires significant effort (time and tokens) to overcome. Or ideally a global maximum.
With time, the LLMs improve, so the diffs/gradients get better and we will be able to reach optimal points for any software faster.
My problem with the idea is that apparently it is assumed that OSS contributors and especially maintainers will generously donate their time to get this machinery into a state that makes the optimization loop work well - just for the AI labs to turn around and sell access to the optimized models for increasingly larger amounts of money.
AI generated code can be great. Hand rolled code can be bad. The rules are the same in both cases. Make sure your code changes are focused (no random changes just because you happen to be in the file/dir or notice something) and make sure you don't break anything else along the way.
I think this will sort itself out over time, as people realise that it’s no longer impressive whatsoever to land an AI-assisted PR to the Linux kernel.
Isn't it mostly the medium that's problematic? With an issue tracker it's easier to close as duplicate
An open visibility tracker would be a goldmine for finding new exploits before a fix is even available.
From what I’ve seen many of the AI bug search operators are newer to security research. They’re burning their tokens trying to find kernel bugs as their claim to fame before other people with AI tools find them first. They don’t spend time de-duplicating their own bugs.
Some of them may not be coming from real people. There are honeypot repos that are entirely fake and only have folders of simple files with clear security problems. They collect automated reports they get from all of the AI bots that people are running.
So make it a closed issue tracker with a public email gateway. Get Anthropic to donate LLM time to classify and combine incoming reports.
If the LLM hallucinates bugs what makes you think any classification won't be hallucinated?
The issue highlighted in Linus's message isn't that the LLM is hallucinating fake bugs; it's that 100 people running the same LLM on the same codebase find the same real bug 100 times, and if they all send it to the private security mailing list, it's (1) unmanageably high volume and (2) stupid security theater [because by definition any bad actor with the same LLM would find that bug — it's effectively public at that point].
You still spend time identifying duplicates and doing triage. That can be very significant for a project like Linux.
Interestingly enough doing that type of triage is something LLMs are actually great at
If the AI is awesome at identifying security bugs in the linux kernel, it likely can also identify if the thing it's found is similar to something that is already found in the security mailing list?
Or, put another way -- what flags the duplicate? The filer or the system? If my cheese factory is measured by the volume of cheese instead of the quality, I'll churn out the cheese even if it's sloppy duplicated cheese. And that is the case if a person has to flag a new ticket as "same as this" or not.
What's that law that says that any sufficiently large problem turns into a moderation problem?
The problem is that the tech companies are paying their research/marketing departments for headlines that go "Researcher uses powerful new Saga 6.2 release to find 597 kernel vulnerabilities! (Can your company afford NOT getting their $1000/month subscription?)", not for headlines that go "Researcher spends $50.000 to find 597 bugs, then spends $25.000 figuring out 540 of them are duplicates".
Unless the kernel community starts banning & publicly shaming repeat offenders, there's zero incentive for them to put any effort in filtering out duplicates. They are mostly doing it for marketing after all, not out of a genuine interest in making the kernel better.
> it likely can also identify if the thing it's found is similar to something that is already found in the security mailing list?
It can not because this mailing list is not public.
> “AI detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved – and only makes that duplication worse because the reporters can't even see each other's reports.”
Ah; so it _is_ a tool problem. It is _also_ a moderation problem.
One could ban orgs that flood the zone with AI generated trash, but is there some potential middle ground where there are sets of filters to identify duplicated bugs, and possibly just internally dump "AI spam" to a lower queue?
This seems like the sort of problem I'd addressed in the 90s with killfiles and spamassassin. In other words, can't the ingestion just go through some filters to shield the humans at the end of the pipe?
While true, security reports should be treated as confidential until a patch is widely available.
And with a mailing list you don't even have to do that! The problem doesn't really change, because you have to figure out whether it is a duplicate before you can mark it as duplicate, and that's the 'managing' part of 'unmanageable'.
Make it anonymous and the problem will go away.
The problem is people trying to get individual credit for merely running a script that spams a mailing list. Many of those people are likely not even C programmers or programmers at all.
Without the immense personal reward and recognition and job offers as a motivation, the problem will disappear.
The problem will also disappear with time as the people lauding and celebrating and hiring security researchers of the past will quickly abandon LLM generated spam as a positive signal; running a prompt that sends spam is, if anything, a strong negative indicator of infosec ability and skill.
LLMs are a tool. Like all tools, most people can't or won't use them responsibly or profitably although they are useful in the correct hands.
> Torvalds' remarks contrast with recent comments from fellow kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, who recently told The Register that AI has become an increasingly useful tool for the FOSS community
Thats kinda a misrepresentation. They are talking about two different things. Linus is trying to point out incorrect use of a tool while GKH is praising a correct use. This sentence felt weird at the end of the article, kind like rage bait. And I took it :P.
So ... who, exactly, is AI supposed to be "helping"???
The "security researches" who post those bugs. Their goal being self promotion.
Maybe it's time to require public zero-knowledge proofs of a working exploits before privately-delivered exploit details can be considered.
So ... first, AI slop is killing mankind slowly. Skynet is winning here.
On the other hand ... IF the bug report is real, and let's assume that AI slop reports at the least a few bugs that are indeed real, then I really think it should not make a difference WHO or WHAT reports these bugs. I would not disagree on fake bugs or bogus bug reports wasting time of humans, but this is a quality difference then. Surely people can tweak AI models to be better at finding bugs too. Besides, they should auto-fix that. Is AI still too stupid to fully replace humans? Other than killing them with spam, as it does right now.
I'd really like maintainers to get their hands dirty with AI agents as well to help speed up the reviews.
Over the last year there have been way too many stories and Twitter posts like these.
Yes, maintainers are overloaded, but that's only because we haven't yet built the tools to support them.
Other than such statements, I would, as a builder like to hear the sorts of tools and requirements maintainers are looking for which would make their work easier!
We need to move fast without breaking things.
I'm a huge AI advocate but even I can't get on board with this.
Feel free to fork the kernel and maintain your own vibe-coded disaster.
I'm confused by your answer, the previous post doesn't seem to be about vibe-coding at all.
It seems to be more about:
1. auto grouping duplicate security reports
2. auto validating if they are likely viable or likely nonsense
3. auto checking if they have recently been patched
4. auto assessing if they likely "invalide" for other reasons (e.g. they are for a very old long time no longer maintained Linux version, out of tree drivers, etc.)
I mean practically all of that isn't trivial to get working in a way appropriate for the Linux security mailing list and comes with many not so obvious complications. But also non of that is vibe coding and in most cases this is is more about AI doing a per-assemsment of send security issues to speed up the review of them, then it is about the AI doing the final decision.
Exactly.
At the end of the day, we would rather have a more stable and bug-free kernel than not.
It's not that much work for me anymore to report and even fix that obscure monitor driver bug that sometimes causes my machine to bootloop, unless I boot without graphics and start the XOrg server manually.
I often find myself surprised at how easily frontier models are able to find bugs across abstraction layers, that only original authors can comprehend. We need more positivity around these contributions as well.