Comment by nsood
4 years ago
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.
He writes "We are not experts in the linux kernel..." after pushing so many changes since 2018. I am left scratching my head.
And what about the other 20 commits? (not that it is so important, but sometimes a missing detail can be annoying)
Haha
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.
However, if you use a personal email, you can’t hide behind “I’m just doing my research”.
no, that would get them around an automatic filter, but the ban was on people from the university, not just people using uni email addresses.
I'm not sure how the law works in such cases, but surely the IRB would eventually have to realize that an explicit denouncement by the victims means that the "research" cannot go ahead
For one, it’s a way of punishing the university.
Eg - If you want to do kernel related research, don’t go to the university of Minnesota.
Which is completely fine, IMO, because,as pointed out already, the university's IRB has utterly failed here. There is no way how this sort of "research" could have passed an ethics review.
- Human subjects - Intentionally misleading/misrepresenting things, potential for a lot of damage, given how widespread Linux is - No informed consent at all!
Sorry but one cannot use unsuspecting people as guinea pigs for research, even if it is someone from a reputable institution.
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.
As a Minnesota U employee/student you cannot submit officially from campus or using the minn. u domain.
As Joe Blow at home who happens to go to school or work there you could submit even if you were part of the research team. Because you are not representing the university. The university is banned.