Comment by IAmNotAFix
4 years ago
At this point how do you even make the difference between their genuine behavior and the behavior that is part of the research?
4 years ago
At this point how do you even make the difference between their genuine behavior and the behavior that is part of the research?
I would say that, from the point of view of the kernel maintainers, that question is irrelevant, as they never agreed to taking part in any research so. Therefore, from their perspective, all the behaviour is genuinely malevolent regardless of the individual intentions of each UMN researcher.
This. This research says something about Minnesota's ethics approval process.
I'm surprised it passed their IRB. Any research has to go through them, even if it's just for the IRB to confirm with "No this does not require a full review". Either the researchers here framed it in a way that there was no damage being done, or they relied on their IRB's lack of technical understanding to realize what was going on.
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Yes!! Minnesota sota caballo rey. Spanish cards dude
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It does prevent anyone with a umn.edu email address, be it a student or professor, of submitting patches of _any kind,_ even if they're not part of research at all. A professor might genuinely just find a bug in the Linux kernel running on their machines, fix it, and be unable to submit it.
To be clear, I don't think what the kernel maintainers did is wrong; it's just sad that all past and future potentially genuine contributions to the kernel from the university have been caught in the crossfire.
I looked into it (https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/mvd6zv/greg_khs_resp...). People from the University of Minnesota has 280 commits to the Linux kernel. Of those, 232 are from the three people directly implicated in this attack (that is, Aditya Pakki and the two authors of the paper), and the remaining 28 commits is from one individual who might not be directly involved.
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The professor, or any students, can just use a non edu email address, right? It really doesn't seem like a big deal to me. It's not like they can personally ban anyone who's been to that campus, just the edu email address.
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I think in explicitly stating that no on from the university is allowed to submit patches includes disallowing them from submitting using personal/spoof addresses.
Sure they can only automatically ban the .edu address, but it would be pretty meaningless to just ban the university email host, but be ok with the same people submitting patches from personal accounts.
I would also explicitly ban every person involved with this "research" and add their names to a hypothetical ban list.
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It would be hard to show this wasn’t genuine behaviour but a malicious attempt to infect the Linux kernel. That still doesn’t give them a pass though. Academia is full of copycat “scholars”. Kernel maintainers would end up wasting significant chunks of their time fending off this type of “research”.
The kernel maintainers don't need to show or prove anything, or owe anyone an explanation. The University's staff/students are banned, and their work will be undone within a few days.
The reputational damage will be lasting, both for the researchers, and for UMN.
One could probably do a paper about evil universities doing stupid things.. anyway evil actions are evil regardless of the context, research 100-yrs ago was intentionally evil without being questioned, today ethics should filter what research should be done or not