• Stenberg: The end of the curl bug-bounty program

    From LWN.net@86:200/23 to All on Tue Jan 27 06:40:07 2026

    Curl creator Daniel Stenberg has written a blog
    post explaining why the project is ending its bug-bounty
    program, which started in April 2019:

    The never-ending slop submissions take a serious mental toll to
    manage and sometimes also a long time to debunk. Time and energy that
    is completely wasted while also hampering our will to live.

    I have also started to get the feeling that a lot of the security
    reporters submit reports with a bad faith attitude. These "helpers"
    try too hard to twist whatever they find into something horribly bad
    and a critical vulnerability, but they rarely actively contribute to
    actually improve curl. They can go to extreme efforts to argue and
    insist on their specific current finding, but not to write a fix or
    work with the team on improving curl long-term etc. I don't think we
    need more of that.

    There are these three bad trends combined that makes us take this
    step: the mind-numbing AI slop, humans doing worse than ever and the
    apparent will to poke holes rather than to help.

    Stenberg writes that he still expects "the best and our most
    valued security reporters" to continue informing the project when
    security vulnerabilities are discovered. The program will officially
    end on January 31, 2026.

    https://lwn.net/Articles/1055996/
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