Everyone is talking about AI in the comments, but the article estimates only 20% of their submissions are AI slop.
The rest are from people who want a curl contribution or bug report for their resume. With all of the talk about open source contributions as a way to boost your career or get a job, getting open source contributions has become a checklist item for many juniors looking for an edge. They don’t have the experience to know what contributions are valuable or correct, they just want something to put on their resume.
I’ve had mixed results. Most maintainers are happy to receive a well formatted update to their documentation. Some get angry at me for submitting non-code updates. It’s weird
But updating dependencies and such is totally unproductive. It's contributing for the sake of having contributed in its purest form. The only thing that's worse is opening a PR to add a political banner to someone else's readme, and then getting very pissed off when they respectfully close it.
Such as the buffer length check in [1] where the report hallucinated an incorrect length calculation and even quoted the line, then completely ignored that the quoted line did not match what the report was talking about and was in fact correct.
So essentially, can we put up a gaslighting filter?
It seems like those kinds of inconsistencies could be found, ironically, by an LLM.
Do remember "we're" (hi, interjecting) talking about open source maintainers, we didn't all make curl or Facebook
They could offer value, but just rarely, at least with the LLM/model/context they used.
> toll it takes to deal with these mind-numbing stupidities.
Could have a special area for submitting these where AI does the rejection letter and banning.
Eating human excrement can also offer value in the form of undigested pieces of corn and other seeds. Are you interested?
So…
I don’t care how that sausage is made. Heck, sometimes gen AI even allows people who otherwise wouldn’t have had the time or skills to come up with funny things.
What annoys me is all the spam SEO-gamed websites with low information density drowning the answer I’m actually looking for in pages of empty sentences.
When they haven’t just gamed their way to the top of search results without actually containing any answer.
And that didn’t need LLMs to exist. Just greed and actors with interests unaligned with mine. Such as Google’s former head of ads, apparently. [0][1]
What they did was:
1) Prompt LLM for a generic description of potential buffer overflows in strcopy() and a generic demonstration code for a buffer overflow. (With no connection to curl or even OpenSSL at all)
2) Present some stack traces and grep results that show usage of strcopy() in curl and OpenSSL.
3) Simply claim that the strcopy() usages from 2) somehow indicate a buffer overflow, with no additional evidence.
4) When called out, just pretend that the demonstrator code from 1) were the evidence, even though it's obvious that it's just a textbook example and doesn't call any code from curl.
It's not that they found some potentially dangerous code in curl and didn't go all the way to prove an overflow, which could have at least some value.
The entire thing is just bullshit made to look like a vulnerability report. There is nothing behind it at all.
Edit: Oh, cherry on top: The demonstrator doesn't even use strcopy() - nor any other kind of buffer overflow. It tries to construct some shellcode in a buffer, then gives up and literally calls execve("/bin/sh")...
The worst part is that once they are asked for clarifications by the poor maintainers, they go on offense and become aggressive. Like imagine the nerve of some people, to use LLMs to try to gaslight an actual expert that they made a mistake, and then act annoyed/angry when the expert asks normal questions
My guess is that the aggression is part of the ruse. Trying to start drama/intimidating the other when your bluff is being called out is the oldest strategy...
(You could see a similar pattern in the xz backdoor scheme, where they were deliberately causing distress for the maintainer to lower their guard.)
Or maybe the guy here hoped that the reviewers would run the demo - blindly - and then somehow believe it was real? Because it prints some scary messages and then does open a shell. Even if that's the only thing it does...
Still a net negative overall, given that you have to spend a lot of effort separating the wheat from the chaff.
> Could have a special area for submitting these where AI does the rejection letter and banning.
So we'll just have one AI talking to another AI with an indeterminate outcome and nobody learns anything of value. Truly we live in the future!