Slopwatch: WebProNews, LinuxSecurity, and Some Success Stories
Earlier today: About a Quarter of Today's "linux" News in Google News Came From One Domain and It's a Slopfarm
Today we examined 3 new articles from Bobby Borisov (Linuxiac) and are happy to report that all of them seem authentic. Did Bobby Borisov decide - after a little bit of prodding - to quit using LLMs? We hope so. The aim of Slopwatch is to do so. The goal isn't to admonish as much as to correct by deterrence. Some journalists who cover GNU/Linux complain to us that slopfarms are hurting them.
However, Google News still has a slopfarm issue. It keeps linking to lots of LLM slop from WebProNews, which describes itself as "a leading publisher of business and technology email newsletters and websites."
Once upon a time WebProNews was a real news site. Some 2-3 years ago it began covering GNU/Linux every now and then and about a year ago it regularly did reviews of distros and publish some GNU/Linux news. Then, a few months ago, it began using fake author names with fake images and fake text to produce pure crap. The following 2 are hours-old examples:
We've noticed that they fancy taking Phoronix pages and turning them into slop like this. They do this all the time. Michel Larabel of Phoronix has probably noticed this already.
Another domain that used to have legitimate articles from honest people is LinuxSecurity. Some time 1-2 years ago Day began firing away with LLM slop, and this week she did some slop about TPM in Ubuntu:
And also the "Linux Backdoor" FUD, which some other slopfarms are echoing:
The real issue here is malware, but LLM slop is just made by a stochastic parrot. Either way, we continues to observe slopfarms like the above. █