Bonum Certa Men Certa

Slopwatch: BetaNews, LinuxSecurity.com, and the Attack on Web Search Using Fake and Likely Plagiarised Pages

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 27, 2025

Comic Books Background

There are online and offline articles (or pages meant to look like articles) out there that seem like they cover GNU/Linux, but they do not really. They harvest real authors' work and then use bots to produce phantoms like these:

Zorin OS 17.3 brings Brave browser and better app support as perfect Windows 10 replacement

That was hours ago, i.e. over a day after many originals had become available for scraping (later training) by LLMs. The above is another fake from a Serial Slopper:

It’s time to celebrate, fellow Linux fans. Zorin OS 17.3 is officially available, and it couldn’t have come at a better time

Changing a few words here and there won't change the fact that it's not properly authored, it's a Drunken Plagiarist.

Yesterday we wrote about LinuxSecurity.com, providing the latest examples of LLM slop from it. Nothing can stop that site from contaminating the Web. The founder of that company is no longer involved (no articles), so the Serial Slopper can still devour other people's work (luring people into LLM slop based on plagiarised originals) with SEO "spam" around the term "Security":

Enhancements in Linux Kernel 6.14

Of course it's fake:

Linux kernel version 6.14 has been released

More LLM slop from the same day (it's 100% fake articles that day, i.e. the usual):

Debian vs. Fedora vs. Ubuntu: Which Linux Distro Reigns Supreme in Security?

Once again throwing in the word "Security" while making a totally fake article to fool Google et al.

As a Linux security admin

These people seem to be vandalising the Web while misappropriating other people's work. The facilitators, such as Microsoft's Scam Altman, are losing in court this week. The New York Times managed to convince the judge there was likely copyright infringement (see latest Daily Links).

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