Aditya: 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.
Greg: You can't quit, you're fired.
“They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
541–550 of 1001 posts
Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
#542I am concerned that the kernel maintainers might be falling into another trap: it is possible that some patches were designed such that they are legitimate fixes, and moreover such that reverting them amounts to introducing a difficult-to-detect malicious bug.
Maybe I'm just too cynical and paranoid though.
Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
#543I 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…
just write to irb@umn.edu and ask if this was a) reviewed and b) who approved it. It seems they have anyway violated the Human Research Protection Program Plan.
The researchers should not have done this, but ultimately it's the faculty that must be held accountable for allowing this to happen in the first place. They are a for-profit institution and should not get away with harassing people who are contributing their personal time. So nail them to the proverbial cross but make sure the message is heard by those who slipped up (not the researchers who should have been stopped before it happened).
Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
#544This seems like a pretty scummy way to do "research". I mean I understand that people in academia are becoming increasingly disconnected from the real world, but wow this is low. It's not that they're doing this, I'm sure they're not the first to think of this (for research or malicious reasons), but having the gall to brag about it is a new low.
The researchers have a future at Facebook, which experimented on how to make users feel bad.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=facebook+emotional+study&t=fpas&ia...
Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
#545This seems like a pretty scummy way to do "research". I mean I understand that people in academia are becoming increasingly disconnected from the real world, but wow this is low. It's not that they're doing this, I'm sure they're not the first to think of this (for research or malicious reasons), but having the gall to brag about it is a new low.
I believe this is violating research ethics hard, very hard. Reminds me if someone was aiming at researching childs' mental development through the study of inflicting mental damages. The subjects and the likely damages are not similar but the approach and mentality are inconveniently so.
yep first thing I thought was how did this get through the research ethics panel (all research at my University has to get approval).
Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
#546The professor gets exactly what they want here, no? "We experimented on the linux kernel team to see what would happen. Our non-double-blind test of 1 FOSS maintenance group has produced the following result: We get banned and our entire university gets dragged through the muck 100% of the time". That'll be a fun paper to write, no doubt. Additional context: * One of the committers of these faulty patches, Aditya Pak…
> The thread then gets down to business and starts coordinating revert patches for everything committed by University of Minnesota email addresses. What's preventing those bad actors from not using a UMN email address?
see https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YIAmy0zgrQW%2F44Hz@kroah.c...
If they just want to be jerks, yes. But they can't then use that type of "hiding" to get away with claiming it was done for a University research project as that's even more unethical than what they are doing now.
Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
#547Am I missing how these patches were caught/flagged? Was it an automated process or physically looking at the pull requests?
Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
#548The 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 P…
I’ve seen this book mentioned a couple of times on HN now. I’m curious: did you learn about this book from the fourth season of the Fargo? This is where I encountered it first.
Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
#549Though I disagree with the research in general, if you did want to research "hypocrite commits" in an actual OSS setting, there isn't really any other way to do it other than actually introducing bugs per their proposal. That being said, I think it would've made more sense for them to have created some dummy complex project for a class and have say 80% of the class introduce "good code", 10% of the class review all c…
> Though I disagree with the research in general, if you did want to research "hypocrite commits" in an actual OSS setting, there isn't really any other way to do it other than actually introducing bugs per their proposal. they could've done the much harder work of studying all of the incoming patches looking for bugs, and then just not reporting their findings until the kernel team accepts the patch. the kernel has…
The point of the research isn't to study bugs, it's to study hypocrite commits. Given that a hypocrite commit requires intention, there's no other way except to submit commits yourself as the submitter would obviously know their own intention.
Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
#550Like all research institutions, University of Minnesota has an ethics committee.
https://integrity.umn.edu/ethics
Feel free to write to them