Comment by SirSavary

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.