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wire 2026-07-03
stories 54
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ARCHWIKI LOCKED DOWN AGAINST CRAWLER ASSAULT

By RepoJournal · Filed · About Arch Linux · Composed from the cited sources · methodology

The wiki's under siege from aggressive bots, and infrastructure just deployed a three-layer defense that rewrites the ruleset, hardens the challenge protocol, and bumps MediaWiki to 1.45.4.

Crawlers have been hammering archwiki with `returnto=` parameter abuse, forcing the team to escalate anti-bot measures across the board [1][2]. The anubis challenge system got two upgrades overnight: tighter MediaWiki rules to penalize the parameter-stuffing tactics crawlers favor, plus a significant difficulty bump on expensive challenges to make brute-force attacks prohibitively slow [2][3]. MediaWiki itself jumped to 1.45.4 as part of the hardening pass . Meanwhile, the repo side stayed quiet but productive: kmscon and loadtracker both landed new versions in extra [4][5], while testing packages for python-pyro, muse, and fish all graduated to stable [6][7][8]. Nothing critical here, but the wiki work matters - this is the kind of infrastructure polish that keeps community resources running clean.

Action items

References

  1. [1] Merge branch 'wiki-lockdown' into 'main' ↗ archlinux/infrastructure
  2. [2] anubis: Tweak the mediawiki ruleset ↗ archlinux/infrastructure
  3. [3] anubis: Increase difficulty of expensive challenge ↗ archlinux/infrastructure
  4. [4] update kmscon to 10.0.1-1 in extra-x86_64 archlinux/state ↗
  5. [5] update loadtracker to 1.0.0-1 in extra-x86_64 archlinux/state ↗
  6. [6] move python-pyro from extra-testing-any to extra-any archlinux/state ↗
  7. [7] move muse from extra-testing-x86_64 to extra-x86_64 archlinux/state ↗
  8. [8] move fish from extra-testing-x86_64 to extra-x86_64 archlinux/state ↗

$ ls archlinux/reviews/ # the step-back reads

the week in review Kernel v7.2.4-arch1 ships with userns sysctl the month in review August's Arch: AUR hardening, kernel churn, and steady package flow
Full archive → Weekly reviews →

Quick answers

What shipped in Arch Linux on July 3, 2026?
The wiki's under siege from aggressive bots, and infrastructure just deployed a three-layer defense that rewrites the ruleset, hardens the challenge protocol, and bumps MediaWiki to 1.45.4. In total, 54 commits landed.
What were the notable Arch Linux updates?
Merge branch 'wiki-lockdown' into 'main', anubis: Tweak the mediawiki ruleset, and anubis: Increase difficulty of expensive challenge.
♥

$ log @archlinux --recent

Felix Yan promotes the xmonad stack to extra, moor lands at 2.19.2 50 shipped Synapse 1.161.0 lands in infrastructure, anki promoted to extra 70 shipped Arch ships a CLONE_NEWUSER kill switch in v7.2.6-arch2 59 shipped mise and asusctl land in extra, tracexec hits 1.0 50 shipped

$ log --all # elsewhere on the wire

Alignment & Post-training verl rejects conflicting vLLM engine_kwargs, open-instruct adds MILES OPD behind a Megatron learner Interpretability nnsight 0.8.0 cuts import time from 7.6s to 1.6s

$ ls showcases/

Safety Evals AI Red Teaming Agent Security Interpretability Alignment & Post-training

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