Projects with bigger problems [LWN.net]

Projects with bigger problems

Posted Apr 30, 2026 17:37 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Projects with bigger problems by marcH
Parent article: Dependency-cooldown discussions warm up

I see it all the time - you want a HTTPS client, or a WiFi manager, and unless you know the name of the project you want already, you search for a generic term like that. And those terms will be absolutely overloaded with automated spam options - unless you know already that cURL is your HTTPS client of choice, or that you want IWD to manage WiFi connections, you're going to be facing people flooding out the things you want.

Not to mention typosquatting and other attacks on the humans doing this - you think you're donating to cURL, but you're donating to cURI instead.

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Projects with bigger problems

Posted Apr 30, 2026 17:46 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

When people are overloaded with generic offers, they usually turn to stats, reviews and other reputation systems and for software that is more than enough, you just need to invest more than a few minutes.

I think you also keep losing sight that we are discussing _voluntary_ contributions to... projects randomly picked up in a list? I'm not saying this would never happen, I'm just saying it will be small enough not to harm the system as a whole. Same for typosquatting.

For a bad actor typosquatting, security and owning target systems is probably more valuable than collecting contribution pennies.

Projects with bigger problems

Posted Apr 30, 2026 18:02 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Right, and what I'm saying is that the system will not work, because as soon as there's money in the system, people will game stats, reviews, reputation systems, and more.

As a result, either you have no contributions (hence no money, hence no attackers), or you're faced with a flood of attackers making the system more expensive to run. The only reason Temu and places like it survive is that, with a flood of attackers, you still have people who have to pay to get the goods at all; but if I don't have to pay, why would I risk paying on a platform that's full of scams?