Bonum Certa Men Certa

Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, Linux Journal, and Not Much Else

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 21, 2025

We just really hope that some time soon Slopwatch will cease to be 'necessary'.

We've been really pleased with this week. See, Slopwatch was barely necessary because we hardly saw LLM slop and the most notorious slopfarms either grind to a halt or get delisted from Google News.

Whatever the cause may be (ChatGPT might go offline some time soon, for good), we hope to see the same next week. And next month... and year/s.

Today we caught just a mere couple (two). One example was in LinuxSecurity, which is a slopfarm:

Slop or fake: Ubuntu 18.04 EOL: Understanding Security Management and Risks

Talking about something released 7.5 years ago and using LLM slop to "make" it.

Another slopfarm, Linux Journal (used to be a real news site), made some slop with what seems to be ChatGPT (based on structural traits).

It's likely based on real articles [1, 2], but this one adds nothing new:

Slop or fake: Wine 10.19 Released: Game Changing Support for Windows Reparse Points on Linux

Who in Slashdot Media [1, 2, 3] decided to turn Linux Journal into a slopfarm? It's incredibly damaging to the site's credibility, including its past work. One way or another, hopefully sooner rather than later, the slop bubble will burst, leaving not much behind it, not even ChatGPT (it's way too expensive to operate and getting out of hand).

Hey Hi Infrastructure

As an associate has put or explained the above: "Of unknown provenance but clearly based on the XKCD comic."

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