Comment by thenoblesunfish
4 years ago
The point is to make it very obviously not worth it to conduct this kind of unethical research. I don't think UMN is going to be eager to have this kind of attention again. People could always submit bogus patches from random email addresses - this removes the ability to do it under the auspices of a university.
The ethical aspect is separate from the practical aspect that is kernel security.
Sabotage is a very real risk but we're discussing ethics of demonstrating the risk instead of potential remediation, that's dangerous and foolish.
> this removes the ability to do it under the auspices of a university
It really doesn't though. You can claim ownership of that email address in the published manuscript. For that matter, you could even publish the academic article under a pen name if you wanted to. But after seeing how the maintainers responded here, you'd better make sure that any "real" contributions you make aren't associated with the activity in any way.