Linux security mailing list 'almost unmanageable'

Linus Torvalds, the famously blunt public face of Linux, has basically said the project’s private security inbox is turning into a duplicate-report disaster. His complaint: too many people are using artificial intelligence tools to spot bugs, then firing off the same findings again and again, leaving volunteers stuck doing inbox triage instead of fixing problems. His message was less “AI bad” and more “don’t be a drive-by tipster — bring a fix, not just noise.”

But the real fireworks were in the comments, where the crowd instantly split into camps. One side rolled its eyes at the supposed contradiction with another Linux maintainer praising AI, with one commenter snapping that both things can obviously be true at once: AI can help, and people can still use it badly. Another faction said the real villain isn’t AI at all — it’s the old-school mailing list format, with one person arguing this would be far easier to manage in a modern issue tracker where duplicates can simply be closed.

Then came the truly spicy takes. One commenter declared AI language tools are basically “the most powerful spam weapon ever invented,” which tells you the mood. Another accused the news story itself of overcooking the drama and pointed readers to the original post, saying the outlet turned a note about documentation into a whole AI panic headline. And in the most chaotic twist of all, one user claimed someone is already bombarding Linux mailing lists with 26MB nonsense patch emails that look AI-generated — a detail so absurd it sounds like satire, except everyone in the thread seemed way too tired to laugh for long.