2025-W12 reading notes

AI web scrapers causing headaches

Source: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

Turns out “AI” is as irresponsible as it is opaque. Bots ordered by “AI” companies to scrape the web cause a lot of trouble for maintainers of infrastructure of projects like KDE or GNOME, because they are retrieving data from whole websites and web applications ignoring robots.txt.

OSI

FreeBSD boot loader bug

I've been seeing this message for quite some time:

BOOT LOADER IS TOO OLD. PLEASE UPGRADE.

Surrounded by a frame of asterisks, it looked serious. So I searched a bit, eventually finding bug #282001: Inappropriate "BOOT LOADER IS TOO OLD" / missing initialization of bootprog_rev in lutils.c. It was interesting to observe the decision-making process.

FreeBSD Handbook