Re: Malicious commits to Linux kernel as part of university study

[Jan Engelhardt <jengelh () inai de>]

On Thursday 2021-04-22 17:02, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> Peter Bex:
> > The university of Minnesota has been banned from making any commits to
> > the Linux kernel after it was found out they'd been submitting bogus
> > patches to the LKML to knowingly introduce security issues:
> > https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YH%2FfM%2FTsbmcZzwnX () kroah com/
>
> I support research, but I personally think this work goes way beyond
> any ethical boundaries. While I don’t know if it’s *illegal* (I’m
> not a lawyer!), it seems clear to me that these U of MN researchers
> were conducting experiments on people without their prior consent.

If you alert the crowd that something is about to happen, you can no 
longer observe how the crowd acts in an unalerted state, dooming the 
research effort.

Not to encourage UMN's conduct, but I'd find that the prank shows on TV 
(let alone Youtube) are a much more severe intrusion, but somehow those 
shows still run.


What's more, with the pitchfork way this incident is being responded to, 
future researchers may choose to operate more stealthily; no more 
mailings from an edu mail address, more elaborate internet avatars (did 
we ever prove who George Spelvin was?), up to the point that the 
identities become indistinguishable from a foreign malignent elite 
hacker group.