Slop Versus Free Software and Free Software Combatting Slop ("AI" Scammers, Plagiarism, Plunder)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 26, 2026

• Poisoning scraperbots with iocaine

  Web sites are being increasingly beset by AI scraperbots — a problem that we have written about before, and which has slowly ramped up to an occasional de-facto DDoS attack. This has not gone uncontested, however: web site operators from around the world have been working on inventive countermeasures. These solutions target the problem posed by scraperbots in different ways; iocaine, a MIT-licensed nonsense generator, is designed to make scraped text less useful by poisoning it with fake data. The hope is to make running scraperbots not economically viable, and thereby address the problem at its root instead of playing an eternal game of Whac-A-Mole.

• Do androids dream of accepted pull requests? [LWN.net]

  Various forms of tools, colloquially known as "AI", have been rapidly pervading all aspects of open-source development. Many developers are embracing LLM tools for code creation and review. Some project maintainers complain about suffering from a deluge of slop-laden pull requests, as well as fabricated bug and security reports. Too many projects are reeling from scraperbot attacks that effectively DDoS important infrastructure. But an AI bot flaming an open-source maintainer was not on our bingo card for 2026; that seemed a bit too far-fetched. However, it appears that is just what happened recently after a project rejected a bot-driven pull request.

  At least on the surface, it appears that an AI agent had gone on the attack against a Matplotlib maintainer for a rejected pull request—though how much autonomy it truly had, and who is behind the bot, is unknown. Some skepticism that the bot is operating entirely on its own is more than warranted. It is possible that a person is orchestrating the bot's actions more directly than it claims, but the bot's responses seem to be within the capabilities of current AI agents.

• Open source security in spite of AI [LWN.net]

  The curl project has found AI-powered tools to be a mixed bag when it comes to security reports. At FOSDEM 2026, curl creator and lead developer Daniel Stenberg used his keynote session to discuss his experience receiving a slew of low-quality reports and, at the same time, realizing that large language model (LLM) tools can sometimes find flaws that other tools have missed.

  FOSDEM is famously jam-packed with things to do and talks to attend; there are dozens of devrooms for different topics, as well as the main-stage keynotes and sessions. Stenberg's keynote was at 17:00 on Sunday, one of the last events on FOSDEM's schedule; no doubt the organizers selected his talk as the most likely to lure a large audience into the main room for the closing session that would follow it. The ploy worked; the room was effectively standing-room only. He opened his session by saying ""it's this, and then we can all go home. You look a little tired; it feels like I've talked to almost all of you already"".

  Stenberg said that many of the audience had already followed his struggles with AI; he has been active in blogging about and commenting on AI via social media for some time. He acknowledged that it would upset some of the audience that he was saying "AI" rather than being specific with terms like "LLM" or "machine learning" but, ""in my talk, I don't care. I'm using the marketing language. It's all 'AI'. When people throw something at me, they say they used AI to do it.""

• Open-source mapping for disaster response [LWN.net]

  At FOSDEM 2026 Petya Kangalova, a senior tech partnership and engagement manager for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) spoke about how the project helps people map their surroundings to assist in disaster response and humanitarian aid. The project has developed a stack of technology to help volunteers collectively map an area and add in local knowledge metadata. ""One of the core things that we believe is that when we speak about disaster response or people having access to data is that they really need accessible technology that's free and open for anyone to use"."

  I was not able to attend FOSDEM 2026 in person, but watched the session via FOSDEM's live stream. The video and slides from the session are available on the FOSDEM 2026 talk page.

  HOT is a separate entity from OpenStreetMap (OSM), the grassroots endeavor to map and annotate the globe. But HOT, a non-profit non-governmental organization (NGO), cut a deal to use the OSM name and maps, as well contribute its work back to OSM's maps. LWN first covered HOT in 2014. The project focuses on "blank spots", which are areas of the world that lack maps, and especially those areas suffering (or might easily suffer from) a disaster such as a hurricane or volcano activity. Disasters around the world can kill hundreds of thousands of people and leave millions displaced each year. People, especially in dire circumstances, ""need technology that is open and free"", Kangalova said.