Slopwatch: Security SPAM and LLM Slop for SEO and FUD Purposes, Perpetually Tarnishing the Perception of Linux and (Open)SSH Security
A lot of this Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD) comes from Microsoft and its LLMs. Fear-mongering/dramatisation tactics moreover portray a mostly harmless bug in smb2 as a serious Linux problem found by an LLM. That's just hype.
The World Wide Web is fast becoming a pile of garbage or a dumpster fire. A few months ago we showed Serial Sloppers pushing Microsoft's spammy utterances about "Quantum", meant and clearly timed to distract from news about Microsoft shutting down slop ("hey hi") datacentres due to a decrease in demand, followed by many waves mass layoffs that also impact so-called "AI" experts. Now they're looking for a new hype wave to surf and they even googlebomb "Linux":
This is what Google News is pushing today as "news" about "linux", even if the text and images are fake:
Another slopfarm? Well, this one certainly is:
They just googlebomb "Linux" for SEO purposes. This LLM slop is even misleading:
Showing a lack of comprehension.
Of course the text barely makes sense. Because "Day" didn't write it, maybe she glued together some word salads, as usual.
More worrying however is press written by actual people to stigmatise Linux as bad when Linux has absolutely nothing to do with what's covered. Notice how many sites are blaming "Linux" and "SSH" for bad passwords; we saw over half a dozen such articles this past week and filed them with comments in the sister site, e.g. in this page (there are more). It's utterly ridiculous that the headlines always speak of "Linux" and sometimes "SSH" as well. Only further down it's noted that what's actually happening is that bad/week passwords get scanned for (in parallel). Some of the latest examples of this say it's due to "brute-force logins on port 22", but headlines always name Linux as if the kernel has passwords hard-coded into it. It's also good practice not to use port 22, especially if one does not change default passwords or instead assumes that "goodmorning123" is an OK password because it's "safe enough".
An associate has meanwhile pointed out that "Schneier on Security" serves an example of "blaming the victim, some more, to distract from Microsoft not being fit for purpose".
And "unless your OS or Application is designed to run things on sight, malware is just harmless data," the associate added.
As a start, people need to just stop using Windows (which Schneier uses or at least still used years ago). The same goes for businesses and the public sector. Start exploring GNU/Linux. █
