Slopwatch: linuxsecurity.com, linuxjournal.com, WebProNews, Cyber Security News, and More
It has been a while since the last Slopwatch for reasons that we explained several times throughout the week. On Monday we found almost no slop at all and in subsequent days there was not much of it! That's good!
What's more, it "feels" or "seems" like Google News may have managed to block (or delist rather) some of the most obnoxious slopfarms. We'll come to that in a minute.
Remember that the goal is to lessen the incentive to use slop. If the sloppers receive less traffic, they may stop sooner.
This is what the slopfarm linuxsecurity.com yielded this week (Slopwatch has long mentioned it and months ago it quit putting real people's names on the slop). Notice below the pseudonym:
Aside from this they've hardly had any input (LLM word salads) or output ("articles") this week. The same is true for linuxjournal.com, which published slop about Firefox - the former Web browser which itself gets marketed as a slop browser by a misguided Mozilla:
Over at Google News we only saw two examples of slop today. That's an improvement. The first one is from WebProNews:
It's a fake article with a slop image, but it relies on some text other people wrote. Consider the latest from analytics.usa.gov, which analyses billions of sessions to show these trends:
It's nice that GNU/Linux is growing, but not so nice that slopfarms try to control the narrative.
The Serial Slopper Brian Fagioli produced some slop about OEMs that make GNU/Linux available (owing to a rise in actual demand):
That latter one about Slimbook likely piggybacks some real articles.
In Google News, another example of slop can be seen right now: the slopfarm Cyber Security News.
Yes, it's a slopfarm and Google News still links to it and to its sister slopfarm. Ultimately, after the bubble pops, there might be none left (they rely on LLM providers upstream and those providers lose way too much money). To refute some propaganda sites that are literally funded by slop sales teams, NVIDIA sales do not dispute that there is a slop ("hey hi") bubble; quite the opposite in fact, as they reaffirm that 1) this bubble does exist and 2) this one company, NVIDIA, will be super-sensitive to the bubble's implosion. An over-supply of 'buzzword chips' spells trouble. █