Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

lore.kernel.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 1001 posts

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#371

Post by the_af »

duxup wrote: post #360

I don't like this university ban approach. Universities are places with lots of different students, professors, and different people with different ideas, and inevitably people who make bad choices. Universities don't often act with a single purpose or intent. That's what makes them interesting. Prone to failure and bad ideas, but also new ideas that you can't do at corporate HQ because you've got a CEO breathing dow…

It's definitely killing a mosquito with a nuke, but what are the alternatives? The kernel maintainers claim these bogus commits already put too much load on their time. I understand they banned the whole university out of frustration and also because they simply don't have the time to deal with them in a more nuanced way.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#372

Post by duxup »

zulban wrote: post #367
duxup wrote: post #360

I don't like this university ban approach. Universities are places with lots of different students, professors, and different people with different ideas, and inevitably people who make bad choices. Universities don't often act with a single purpose or intent. That's what makes them interesting. Prone to failure and bad ideas, but also new ideas that you can't do at corporate HQ because you've got a CEO breathing dow…

It sends a strong message - universities need to make sure their researchers apply ethics standards to any research done on software communities. You can't ignore ethics guidelines like consent and harm just because it's a software community instead of a meatspace community. I doubt the university would have taken any action at all without such a response.

>It sends a strong message

At a cost to mostly people who didn't / and I'll even say wouldn't do the bad thing.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#373

Post by Cpoll »

ajross wrote: post #343
kleiba wrote: post #286

How is such a ban going to be effective? The "researchers" could easily continue their experiments using different credentials, right?

Arbitrary anonymous submissions don't go into the kernel in general. The point[1] behind the Signed-off-by line is to associate a physical human being with real contact information with the change. One of the reason this worked is likely that submissions from large US research universities get a "presumptive good faith" pass. A small company in the PRC, for an example, might see more intensive review. But given the h…

> A small company in the PRC, for an example, might see more intensive review.

Which is a bit silly, isn't it? Grad students are poor and overworked, it seems easy to find one to trick/bribe into signing off your code, if you wanted to do something malicious.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#374

Post by wuxb »

Sending those patches is just disgraceful. I guess they're using the edu emails so banning the university is a very effective action so someone will respond to it. Otherwise, the researchers will just quietly switch to other communities such as Apache or GNU. Who want buggy patches?

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#375

Post by noxer »

francasso wrote: post #101
noxer wrote: post #86

Someone does voluntary work and people think that gives them some ethical privilege to be asked before someone puts their work to the test? Sure it would be nice to ask but at the same time it renders the testing useless. They wanted to see how the review goes if they aren't aware that someone is testing them. You cant do this with consent. The wasting time argument is nonsense too its not like they did this thousand…

Agreed, in fact the review process worked and now they are going to ban all contributions from that university, as it should be. I think it all worked out perfectly

Pathetic, it did not work at all, they told em whenever they missed a planted bug.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#376

Post by whatshisface »

im3w1l wrote: post #336

I can't help but think of the Sokal affair. But I'll leave the comparison to someone more knowledgeable about them both.

I'd bet that it was inspired by the Sokal affair. The difference in reaction is probably because people think the purity of Linux is important but the purity of obscure academic journals isn't. (They're probably right, because one fault in Linux will make the whole system insecure, whereas one dumb paper would go in next to the other dumb papers and leave the good papers unharmed.)

The similarities are that reviewers can get sleepy no matter what they're reviewing. Troll doll QC staff get sleepy. Nuclear reactor operators get sleepy too.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#378

Post by luckylion »

duxup wrote: post #360

I don't like this university ban approach. Universities are places with lots of different students, professors, and different people with different ideas, and inevitably people who make bad choices. Universities don't often act with a single purpose or intent. That's what makes them interesting. Prone to failure and bad ideas, but also new ideas that you can't do at corporate HQ because you've got a CEO breathing dow…

> None of those people did anything wrong. Putting the onus on them to effect change to me seems unfair. The people banned didn't do anything wrong.

Some of the people banned didn't do anything wrong. Others tried to intentionally introduce bugs into the kernel. Their ethics board allowed that or was mislead by them. Obviously they are having serious issues with ethics and processes.

I'm sure the ban can be reversed if they can plausibly claim they've changed. Since this was apparently already their second chance and they've been reported to the university before and the university apparently decided not to act on that complaint ... I have some doubts that "we've totally changed. This time we mean it" will fly.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#380

Post by mosselman »

The tone of Aditya Pakki's message makes me think they would be very well served by reading 'How to Win Friends & Influence People' by Dale Carnegie.

This is obviously the complete opposite of how you should be communicating with someone in most situations let alone when you want something from them.

I have sure been there though so if anything, take this as a book recommendation for 'How to Win Friends & Influence People'.

Post reply on HN