Comment by bluGill
4 years ago
They are probably more familiar with medical research and the types of things that go wrong there. Bad ethics in medical situations is well understood, including psychology. However it is hard to figure out how a mechanical engineer could violate ethics.
I had to do human subjects research training in grad school, just to be able to handle test score data for a math education project. I literally never saw an actual student the whole time I was working on it.
To be fair, the consequences of unethical research in medicine or psychology can be much more dire than what happened here.
Perhaps more dire than what actually happened, but, can you imagine the consequences if any of those malicious patches had actually stuck around in the kernel? Keep in mind when you think about this that Android, which has an 87% market share globally in smartphones[0] runs on top of a modified Linux kernel.
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[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272307/market-share-fore...