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Comment by sida

4 years ago

Let me play devil's advocate here though. This is absolutely necessary and shows the process in the kernel is vulnerable.

Sure, this is "just" a university research project this time. And sure, this is done in bad taste.

But there are legitimately malicious national actors (well, including the US govt and the various 3 letter agencies) that absolutely do this. And the national actors are likely even far more sophisticated than a couple of PhD students. They have the time, resources and energy to do this over a very long period of time.

I think on the whole, this is very net positive in that it reveals the vulnerability of open source kernel development. Despite, how shitty it feels.

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sida

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mikewarot  4 years ago

Let me pile on top of that and note that if Linus had listened to his elders and used a Microkernel instead of the monolith, the kernel would be small enough that this kind of thing wouldn't be happening.