Comment by wolverine876
4 years ago
I don't see the difference between these and other 'hackers', white-hat, black-hat etc. The difference I see is the institution tested, Linux, is beloved here.
Usually people are admired here for finding vulnerabilities in all sorts of systems and processes. For example, when someone submits a false paper to a peer-reviewed journal, people around here root for them; I don't see complaints about wasting the time and violating the trust of the journal.
But should one of our beloved institutions be tested - now it's an outrage?
The outrage and does seem out of place to me. I think it's fair (even reasonable) for the kernel maintainers to ban those responsible, but I'm not sure why everyone here is getting so offended about fairly abstract harms like "wasting the time of the maintainers"
I don't think what has been done here is comparable to other forms of "finding vulnerabilities". Linux and everyone else would be happy if people find vulnerabilities in their code and report them back. And it is not like linux team is unaware of this "vulnerability"
This is more comparable to DDOS ing a web server to test their capabilities of handling DDOS. And they are aware of the issue. And they told you to not do it when you did it before. You just don't waste other people's time/money like that unless they give you the permission.