Slopwatch: Fake Articles About "Linux", Google Helps Ponzi Schemes and Slopfarms in Google News
We've been a lot slower lately because of holidays, but no day would be complete without full batches of Daily Links (Gemini Protocol included) and of course Slopwatch - an ongoing series that emerged out of genuine need.
Slopfarms are a real pain and last night we said that they had slowed down a bit lately, perhaps because their operators too decided to take a summer's break.
Here's LinuxConfig, which went south early in the summer [1, 2], producing LLM slop with slop images again:
On the same day there are articles that are real there (2 out of 3, it seems), so it not fully a slopfarm yet. There is potential for recovery, like in Linuxiac (it stopped doing LLM slop after we had contacted its editor).
A very ardent slopfarm, linuxsecurity.com, is still at it (again):
The LLM slop (text) is just as bland as the headline.
Another borderline slopfarm, Linux Journal, produced this slop:
It also released this piece that is likely not slop. It seems like the text is at least partially LLM slop (but not fully), so maybe there's hope for them, for instance some editorial change that has recognition of slop as a dead-end trajectory.
Over at Google News, today for a change only about 20% of the "linux" results are slopfarms such as this:
And its sister slopfarm:
Google News promotes the above as news, but both are just fake texts with fake images.
This one too is a slopfarm, which Google News very 'kindly' fed with traffic:
As usual for this slopfarm, as we noted before, this is just a ripoff/plagiarism of this Phoronix article.
But worst of all are the results we see today which are slopfarms boosting a Ponzi scheme, assisted by Google News and exploiting the term "Linux". We caught 7 or 8 of them. They basically latch onto the brand "Linux" to push fake currencies and their sites - whose aim is to boost or legitimise the Ponzi scheme/s - have somehow made it into Google News.
Speaking of Ponzi schemes, Microsoft itself looks a lot like a Ponzi scheme. It bases things like revenue or "value" on fiction. Those are based on a kind of pyramid scheme, in effect inventing value that does not exist (out of thin air).
"Which Microsoft document covers the assertion of "good will" as a financial number?" one reader asked me today. We covered that before. Microsoft "claims $119,509,000,000 as "goodwill"," he said, "a fictitious value".
But checking 2023, the fraud becomes a lot clearer to see, as we explained several times before. Microsoft valued "goodwill" at 67,790,000,000 in Q1 2024 and then it nearly doubled to 118,931,000,000 in a matter of months. Where did that come from? Did the mass layoffs cause a company nearly 50 years in existence to double in "goodwill"? Of course not!
Anyway, slopfarms and SEO scammers, along with "creative" (fraudulent) accounting are cut from the same cloth. The term "Serial Slopper" (SS) is offensive by intention. █