Comment by karsinkk

Yeah, especially when the researcher begins gaslighting his subjects. He had the gall to call the maintainer's response "disgusting to hear", and then went on to ask for "the benefit of the doubt" after publishing a paper admitting that he decieved them.

For comparison, imagine that you attented a small conference and unknowingly became a test subject, and when you sit down the chair shocks you with a jolt of electricity. You jump out of your chair and exclaim, "This seat shocked me!" Then the person giving the presentation walks to your seat and sits down and it doesn't shock him (because he's the one holding the button), and he then accuses you of wasting everyone's time. That's essentially what happened here.

That was my thinking too, surely their school's IRB would have a field day with this. The question is whether they ran this by their IRB at all. If they did it, there would be implications on the ethics of everything coming out of UMN. If they didn't, then the same for their lab. I know at my school things were quite clear - if your work requires any interaction with any human not in your lab, you need IRB approval. This is literally just a social engineering experiment, so of course IRB should have reviewed it.

https://research.umn.edu/units/irb

And given the apparent failure of UMN's IRB, banning UMN from contributing to the Linux kernel honestly seems like a correct approach to resolve the underlying issue.

Your particular criticism is not fair in my opinion. Both researchers went to undergrad outside the U.S., so they may not speak English as a first language. Therefore, it's not fair to assume to intended that connotation.

I think this may be unintended. It is very hard to formulate a message that essentially says both "we recognize your time is valuable" and "we know we waste your time, but we decided it's not very important" at the same time, without it sounding sarcastic on some level. Inherent contradiction of the message would get through, regardless of the wording chosen.

Well, or do what an ethical research would do and seek authorization from the board of Linux foundation before doing any (who knows potentially illegal social engineering attacks) on team members.

Next study would involve creating fake grant to study researcher review process of discerning which grant is a scam or not

Exactly. Since when is "people will sometimes believe lies" a uncertain question that needs experimental review to confirm?

Maybe that cop convicted yesterday was actually just a UMN researcher investigating the burning scientific question "does cutting off someone's airway for 9 minutes cause death?".

Had him as a TA, can confirm. Rudest and more arrogant TA I've ever worked with. Outright insulted me for asking questions as a transfer who had never used Linux systems before. Him implying he was ignorant and new is laughable when his whole demeanor was that you're an imbecile for not knowing how these things work.

I don’t mind them publishing that result, as long as they make it clear that everyone from the university was banned, even people not affiliated with their research group. Of course anyone can get around that ban just by using a private email address (and the prior paper from the same research group started out using random gmail accounts rather than @umn.edu accounts), but making this point will hopefully prevent anyone from trying the same bad ideas.