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Linux security mailing list 'almost unmanageable'

217 points by jonbaer 5mo ago

Sweepi 5mo ago
"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.
- happytoexplain 5mo ago
  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.
- ses1984 5mo ago
  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.
  - dathinab 5mo ago
    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 Some of this can be avoided by running open models on sponsored owned hardware, but at the cost of often outdated LLM tech, higher cost, now needing to maintain additional hardware etc.
    - pessimizer 5mo ago
      > the problem here is that many of the submissions are not "make-believe work" but actual existing security issues Not exactly, the submissions are reports about actual existing security issues. They are make-believe work because everybody has access to AI, and anybody could have done it. Deduping is not productive work, it's a search for productive work. Instead of spamming bug reports generated by AI, people should spam cash or token credit of some sort so the project can generate these themselves. The real unnecessary part of the entire process is the submitter. There's no need for an AI middleman. If somebody comes up with some witty trick that gets an AI to find a bug that it wouldn't have found on its own, submit the prompt.
  - mock-possum 5mo ago
    So if a thing is good then it is good, but if a thing is bad then it is bad? Got it!
- renegade-otter 5mo ago
  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.
- orthoxerox 5mo ago
  AI can amplify your intelligence just as easily as it can amplify your stupidity. All while telling you how smart and brilliant you are.
  - Incipient 5mo ago
    [dead]
- j16sdiz 5mo ago
  Torvalds didn't say AI isn't useful. He is saying everybody use AI to file same duplicate bug report causing extra churn.
- m463 5mo ago
  yeah reading the original post linus seems to be pretty constructive in his words and open to AI in a common-sense way.
stabbles 5mo ago
Isn't it mostly the medium that's problematic? With an issue tracker it's easier to close as duplicate
- cduzz 5mo ago
  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?
  - crote 5mo ago
    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.
  - flumes_whims_ 5mo ago
    > “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.”
    - cduzz 5mo ago
      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?
new_account_100 5mo ago
AI (read: LLM technology) is the most powerful spam weapon ever invented.
st_goliath 5mo ago
Here's the actual mailing list post: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wi+JvcuKF2NaD_rGiYrwkR6rxh_2XZmx8BbYm00D1CvTA@mail.gmail.com/ 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.
- throawayonthe 5mo ago
  here is what seems to be the relevant documentation: https://docs.kernel.org/process/security-bugs.html 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#responsible-use-of-ai-to-find-bugs https://docs.kernel.org/process/security-bugs.html#responsib...
- Sebguer 5mo ago
  The Register has always been a... weird 'news' source, but they've gotten significantly worse over the last year or two.
  - m463 5mo ago
    I think people are used to bias in mainstream media, but theregister seems to show it to computer/tech folks. I don't mind, I like opinionated stuff and can make up my own mind, but I wonder what folks with less context/experience think when they read some of their articles. (and at least weird isn't like uncanny-valley-ai-written-weird)
l1k 5mo ago
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_1Rr5FEvPb69Yzifpn=YTEDMH8s_1KKdg@mail.gmail.com/ https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAGg4U=GNtCObd_Nbm_1Rr5FEvPb69Yz...
- probably_wrong 5mo ago
  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.
  - leonidasrup 5mo ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20260518134447/https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAGg4U=GNtCObd_Nbm_1Rr5FEvPb69Yzifpn=YTEDMH8s_1KKdg@mail.gmail.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260518134447/https://lore.kern...
    - OuterVale 5mo ago
      I don't think needlessly straining the Internet Archive's servers is any better.
      - embedding-shape 5mo ago
        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.
        HDBaseT 5mo ago
abelzentric 5mo ago
[flagged]
olive-n 5mo ago
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.
newswasboring 5mo ago
> 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.
moezd 5mo ago
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.
- nashadelic 5mo ago
  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.
  - Tempest1981 5mo ago
    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.
  - harutok 5mo ago
    [flagged]
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
NoSalt 5mo ago
So ... who, exactly, is AI supposed to be "helping"???
- nottorp 5mo ago
  The "security researches" who post those bugs. Their goal being self promotion.
- pavon 5mo ago
  The bug reports are helpful! Many Linux developers including Linus, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Andrew Morton, Chris Mason, and Willy Tarreau have all commented positively on all the legitimate problems that are being found with LLM. Here is just one example article[1]. This is just a workflow issue. In the past it was very rare for multiple people to find and report a security vulnerability at once, so it made sense to keep the discussion private until they were ready to release a fix. With AI that is happening all the time, so it makes more sense for the discussion to be in public to avoid duplication. So they changed the policy accordingly. That is it. [1]https://lwn.net/Articles/1066581/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1066581/
  - soraminazuki 5mo ago
    You're literally commenting on an article that says the influx of low-effort reports caused by AI rendered the security mailing list unusable.
trelbutate 5mo ago
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.
- pixl97 5mo ago
  Because it is an open and widely distributed system that is difficult to take down or otherwise have an extended outage.
- PurpleRamen 5mo ago
  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.
  - SoKamil 5mo ago
    Is there a demo of such communication on YouTube, or at least some article with screenshots?
    - nolist_policy 5mo ago
      http://www.kroah.com/log/blog/2019/08/14/patch-workflow-with-mutt-2019/ http://www.kroah.com/log/blog/2019/08/14/patch-workflow-with...
- fhn 5mo ago
  old people like the old tools that they grew up using
rnxrx 5mo ago
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.
- rolandog 5mo ago
  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".
quotemstr 5mo ago
Maybe it's time to require public zero-knowledge proofs of a working exploits before privately-delivered exploit details can be considered.
shevy-java 5mo ago
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.
parweb 5mo ago
[flagged]
kirtivr 5mo ago
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.
- sockaddr 5mo ago
  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.
  - dathinab 5mo ago
    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.
    - kirtivr 5mo ago
      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.
nave94hn 5mo ago
[flagged]
oncallthrow 5mo ago
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.
VLM 5mo ago
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.
- thewebguyd 5mo ago
  I really like this idea. Removes the fame, blog & resume/job hunting incentive from it. The kernel isn't the only OSS project with this issue either. Requiring submissions & issues to be anonymous could help a ton of other open source projects currently drowning in AI slop issues.
- HDBaseT 5mo ago
  Won't you have the adverse affect? People will spam continuously anyways, for whatever motivation they have (trolling, ai poisoning, hate, etc) and it will become harder to filter through the noise. If you have emails attached, I can confirm that Linus in fact posted something and its probably worth reading. You can gain reputation and I can filter my attention based upon those who have reputation. It's not clear to me that the spammer discussed in this thread is motivated by recognition and job offerings. I don't think this solves it.
perching_aix 5mo ago
Nonsense advice, he's just asking for duplicate slop patches too this way. It's a catch 22. Why not make a separate list for AI generated reports that can be subscribed to instead? If the claim is that these are not private anyhow, no reason not to, and then a reasonable expectation could be held against submitters to check against existing reports. That is unless it is still absolutely sensitive, in which case the only way forward that I see is to start using AI for triaging and duplicate detection as well.
mixxit 5mo ago
I feel like the ability to speed up finding bugs will exceed your ability to fix them and/or review ai PRs It will almost likely find issues that require fundamental design changes to even fix some of these Dangerous waters ahead for data security and vital infrastructure
827a 5mo ago
I hate to be "that guy" but there's a reason why most of the industry stopped using mailing lists for things like this. Extremely impressive that Linux lasted this long.
kadirbg 5mo ago
[flagged]
ryanshrott 5mo ago
Mailing lists are a bad fit for this problem once spam starts taking over. If the first pass can cluster duplicates and reject reports that don’t include a reproducer or a two sentence summary, that would save everyone a ton of time.
beyondscaletech 5mo ago
[flagged]

217 points by jonbaer 5mo ago

"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.

happytoexplain 5mo ago
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.
ses1984 5mo ago
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.
- dathinab 5mo ago
  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.
  - pessimizer 5mo ago
    > the problem here is that many of the submissions are not "make-believe work" but actual existing security issues Not exactly, the submissions are reports about actual existing security issues. They are make-believe work because everybody has access to AI, and anybody could have done it. Deduping is not productive work, it's a search for productive work. Instead of spamming bug reports generated by AI, people should spam cash or token credit of some sort so the project can generate these themselves. The real unnecessary part of the entire process is the submitter. There's no need for an AI middleman. If somebody comes up with some witty trick that gets an AI to find a bug that it wouldn't have found on its own, submit the prompt.
- mock-possum 5mo ago
  So if a thing is good then it is good, but if a thing is bad then it is bad? Got it!
renegade-otter 5mo ago
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.
orthoxerox 5mo ago
AI can amplify your intelligence just as easily as it can amplify your stupidity. All while telling you how smart and brilliant you are.
- Incipient 5mo ago
  [dead]
j16sdiz 5mo ago
Torvalds didn't say AI isn't useful. He is saying everybody use AI to file same duplicate bug report causing extra churn.
m463 5mo ago
yeah reading the original post linus seems to be pretty constructive in his words and open to AI in a common-sense way.

stabbles 5mo ago

Isn't it mostly the medium that's problematic? With an issue tracker it's easier to close as duplicate

cduzz 5mo ago
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?
- crote 5mo ago
  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.
- flumes_whims_ 5mo ago
  > “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.”
  - cduzz 5mo ago
    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?

new_account_100 5mo ago

AI (read: LLM technology) is the most powerful spam weapon ever invented.

st_goliath 5mo ago

Here's the actual mailing list post: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wi+JvcuKF2NaD_rGiYrwkR6rxh_2XZmx8BbYm00D1CvTA@mail.gmail.com/ 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.

throawayonthe 5mo ago
here is what seems to be the relevant documentation: https://docs.kernel.org/process/security-bugs.html 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#responsible-use-of-ai-to-find-bugs https://docs.kernel.org/process/security-bugs.html#responsib...
Sebguer 5mo ago
The Register has always been a... weird 'news' source, but they've gotten significantly worse over the last year or two.
- m463 5mo ago
  I think people are used to bias in mainstream media, but theregister seems to show it to computer/tech folks. I don't mind, I like opinionated stuff and can make up my own mind, but I wonder what folks with less context/experience think when they read some of their articles. (and at least weird isn't like uncanny-valley-ai-written-weird)

l1k 5mo ago

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_1Rr5FEvPb69Yzifpn=YTEDMH8s_1KKdg@mail.gmail.com/ https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAGg4U=GNtCObd_Nbm_1Rr5FEvPb69Yz...

probably_wrong 5mo ago
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.
- leonidasrup 5mo ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20260518134447/https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAGg4U=GNtCObd_Nbm_1Rr5FEvPb69Yzifpn=YTEDMH8s_1KKdg@mail.gmail.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260518134447/https://lore.kern...
  - OuterVale 5mo ago
    I don't think needlessly straining the Internet Archive's servers is any better.
    - embedding-shape 5mo ago
      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.
      - HDBaseT 5mo ago

abelzentric 5mo ago

[flagged]

olive-n 5mo ago

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.

newswasboring 5mo ago

> 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.

moezd 5mo ago

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.

nashadelic 5mo ago
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.
- Tempest1981 5mo ago
  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.
- harutok 5mo ago
  [flagged]

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

NoSalt 5mo ago

So ... who, exactly, is AI supposed to be "helping"???

nottorp 5mo ago
The "security researches" who post those bugs. Their goal being self promotion.
pavon 5mo ago
The bug reports are helpful! Many Linux developers including Linus, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Andrew Morton, Chris Mason, and Willy Tarreau have all commented positively on all the legitimate problems that are being found with LLM. Here is just one example article[1]. This is just a workflow issue. In the past it was very rare for multiple people to find and report a security vulnerability at once, so it made sense to keep the discussion private until they were ready to release a fix. With AI that is happening all the time, so it makes more sense for the discussion to be in public to avoid duplication. So they changed the policy accordingly. That is it. [1]https://lwn.net/Articles/1066581/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1066581/
- soraminazuki 5mo ago
  You're literally commenting on an article that says the influx of low-effort reports caused by AI rendered the security mailing list unusable.

trelbutate 5mo ago

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.

pixl97 5mo ago
Because it is an open and widely distributed system that is difficult to take down or otherwise have an extended outage.
PurpleRamen 5mo ago
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.
- SoKamil 5mo ago
  Is there a demo of such communication on YouTube, or at least some article with screenshots?
  - nolist_policy 5mo ago
    http://www.kroah.com/log/blog/2019/08/14/patch-workflow-with-mutt-2019/ http://www.kroah.com/log/blog/2019/08/14/patch-workflow-with...
fhn 5mo ago
old people like the old tools that they grew up using

rnxrx 5mo ago

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.

rolandog 5mo ago
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".

quotemstr 5mo ago

Maybe it's time to require public zero-knowledge proofs of a working exploits before privately-delivered exploit details can be considered.

shevy-java 5mo ago

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.

parweb 5mo ago

[flagged]

kirtivr 5mo ago

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.

sockaddr 5mo ago
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.
- dathinab 5mo ago
  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.
  - kirtivr 5mo ago
    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.

nave94hn 5mo ago

[flagged]

oncallthrow 5mo ago

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.

VLM 5mo ago

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.

thewebguyd 5mo ago
I really like this idea. Removes the fame, blog & resume/job hunting incentive from it. The kernel isn't the only OSS project with this issue either. Requiring submissions & issues to be anonymous could help a ton of other open source projects currently drowning in AI slop issues.
HDBaseT 5mo ago
Won't you have the adverse affect? People will spam continuously anyways, for whatever motivation they have (trolling, ai poisoning, hate, etc) and it will become harder to filter through the noise. If you have emails attached, I can confirm that Linus in fact posted something and its probably worth reading. You can gain reputation and I can filter my attention based upon those who have reputation. It's not clear to me that the spammer discussed in this thread is motivated by recognition and job offerings. I don't think this solves it.

perching_aix 5mo ago

Nonsense advice, he's just asking for duplicate slop patches too this way. It's a catch 22. Why not make a separate list for AI generated reports that can be subscribed to instead? If the claim is that these are not private anyhow, no reason not to, and then a reasonable expectation could be held against submitters to check against existing reports. That is unless it is still absolutely sensitive, in which case the only way forward that I see is to start using AI for triaging and duplicate detection as well.

mixxit 5mo ago

I feel like the ability to speed up finding bugs will exceed your ability to fix them and/or review ai PRs It will almost likely find issues that require fundamental design changes to even fix some of these Dangerous waters ahead for data security and vital infrastructure

827a 5mo ago

I hate to be "that guy" but there's a reason why most of the industry stopped using mailing lists for things like this. Extremely impressive that Linux lasted this long.

kadirbg 5mo ago

[flagged]

ryanshrott 5mo ago

Mailing lists are a bad fit for this problem once spam starts taking over. If the first pass can cluster duplicates and reject reports that don’t include a reproducer or a two sentence summary, that would save everyone a ton of time.

beyondscaletech 5mo ago

[flagged]