Comment by WrtCdEvrydy
4 years ago
> is to show that the process could be subverted, the lessons are to be learned by someone else.
If you show up to a kernel developer's house, put a gun to their head and tell them to approve the PR, that process can also be subverted...
It can also be subverted by abducting and replacing the entire development team by impostors. What's your point? That process security is hopeless and we should all just go home?
> What's your point? That process security is hopeless and we should all just go home?
That there's an ethical way of testing processes which includes asking for permission and using proven tested methods like sending a certain amount of items N where X are compromised and Y are not compromised and seeing the ratio of K where K are rejected items and the ratio of rejected items which are compromised K/X versus non-compromised items K/Y.
By breaking the ethical component, the entire scientific method of this paper is broken... now I have to go check the kernel pull requests list to see if they sent 300 pull requests and got one accepted or if it was a 1:1 ratio.
> That there's an ethical way of testing processes which includes asking for permission and using proven tested methods like sending a certain amount of items N where X are compromised and Y are not compromised and seeing the ratio of K where K are rejected items and the ratio of rejected items which are compromised K/X versus non-compromised items K/Y.
Again, that's not the same test. You are introducing bias. You are not observing the same thing. Maybe you think that observation is of equal value, but I don't.
> By breaking the ethical component, the entire scientific method of this paper is broken...
Not at all. The scientific method is amoral. The absolute highest quality of data could only be obtained by performing experiments that would make Joseph Mengele faint.
There's always an ethical balance to be struck. For example, it's not ethical to perform experiments on rats to develop insights that are of no benefit to these rats, nor the broader rat population. If we applied our human ethical standards to animals, we could barely figure anything out. So what do we do? We accept the trade-off. Ethical concerns are not the be-all-end-all.
In this case, I'm more than happy to have the kernel developers be the labrats. I think the tradeoff is worth it. Feel free to disagree, but I consider the ethical argument to be nothing but hot air.