421–430 of 1001 posts
I just want you to know that this is extremely unethical to create a paper where you attempt to discredit others by just using your university's reputation to try to create vulnerabilities on purpose. I back your decision and fuck these people. I will additionally be sending a strongly worded email to this person, their advisor and their whoever's in charge of this joke of a computer science school. Sometimes I wish…
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 is not always easy to identify who works for who at a university in regards to someone's research. The faculty member who seems to be directing this is identifiable, obviously. But it is not so easy to identify anyone acting on his behalf - universities don't maintain public lists of grad or undergrad students working for an individual faculty member. Ad in that there seems to be a pattern of obfuscating these patches through different submission accounts specifically to hide the role of the faculty advisor (my interpretation of what I'm reading).
Putting the onus on others is unfair...but from the perspective of Kernel.org, they do not know who from the population is bad actors and who isn't. The goal isn't to penalize the good folks, the goal is to prevent continued bad behavior under someone elses name. Its more akin to flagging email from a certain server as spam. The goal of the policy isn't to get people to effect change, its to stop a pattern of introducing security holes in critical software.
It is perfectly possible that this was IRB approved, but that doesn't necessarily mean the IRB really understood the implications. There are specific processes for research involving deception and getting IRB approval for deception. but there is no guarantee that IRB members have the knowledge or experience with CS or Open Source communities to understand what is happening. The backgrounds of IRB members vary enormously...
> I will not be sending any more patches due to the attitude that is not only unwelcome but also intimidating to newbies and non experts. Maybe not being nice is part of the immune system of open source.
I think so. With a large project I think a realist attitude that raises to the level of mean when there’s bullshit around is somewhat necessary to prevent decay. If not you get cluttered up with bad code and people there for the experience. Like how stackoverflow is lost to rule zealots there for the game not for the purpose. Something big and important should be intimidating and isn’t a public service babysitter...
Like?
How is such a ban going to be effective? The "researchers" could easily continue their experiments using different credentials, right?
If you're a young hacker that wants to get into kernel development as a career, are you going to consider going to a university that has been banned from officially participating in development for arguably the most prolific kernel? The next batch of "researchers" won't be attending the University of Minnesota, and other universities scared of the same fate (missing out on tuition money) will preemptively ban such re…
Interesting, if they provided to NSF human subject research section, to me this is potential research ethics issue. Imagine, saying we would like to test how fire department responds to fire, by setting buildings on fire in NYC.
Also the buildings are not random, but safety critical infrastructure, but this is good, you can advise later:'put a "please do not ignite" sign on the building'.
Research without ethics is research without value. Unbelievable that this could have passed ethics review, so I'd bet it was never reviewed. Big black eye for University of Minnesota. Imagine if you are another doctoral student is CS/EE and this tool has ruined your ability to participate in Linux.
> Research without ethics is research without value. didn't we learn a lot from nazi/japanese experiments from ww2?
I just want you to know that this is extremely unethical to create a paper where you attempt to discredit others by just using your university's reputation to try to create vulnerabilities on purpose. I back your decision and fuck these people. I will additionally be sending a strongly worded email to this person, their advisor and their whoever's in charge of this joke of a computer science school. Sometimes I wish…
Don't harass people.