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“They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

lore.kernel.org

701–710 of 1001 posts

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#701

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.

Individuals should still be able to contribute, just not under the name University of Minnesota.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#702
post #22

Later down thread from Greg K-H: > Because of this, I will now have to ban all future contributions from your University. Understandable from gkh, but I feel sorry for any unrelated research happening at University of Minnesota. EDIT: Searching through the source code[1] reveals contributions to the kernel from umn.edu emails in the form of an AppleTalk driver and support for the kernel on PowerPC architectures. In t…

It definitely would suck to be someone at UMN doing legitimate work, but I don't think it's reasonable to ask maintainers to also do a background check on who the contributor is and who they're advised by.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#703

This 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.

This observation may very well get downvoted to oblivion: what UMN pulled is the Linux kernel development version of the Sokal Hoax. Both are unethical, disruptive, and prove nothing about the integrity of the organizations they target.

The main difference is that the Sokal Hoax worked (that is why it is notable).

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#704
post #342

> 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.

Instead of not being nice, maybe Linux should adopt some sort of CI and testing infrastructure.

Linux are have plenty testing machines, but it are not so simple that you seem to think for to test whole kernel. there is not any catching for all these possible cases, so not nice remain importance. and greater part is driver, driver need device for to work, so CI on this is hard.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#705
After they successfully got buggy patches in, did they submit patches to fix the bugs? And were they careful to make sure their buggy patches didn't make it into stable releases? If not, then they risked causing real damage, and is at least toeing the line of being genuinely malicious.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#706

Here's a clarification from the Researchers over at UMN[1]. They claim that none of the Bogus patches were merged to the Stable code line : >Once any maintainer of the community responds to the email,indicating “looks good”,we immediately point out the introduced bug and request them to not go ahead to apply the patch. At the same time, we point out the correct fixing of the bug and provide our proper patch. In all t…

The response makes the researchers seem clueless, arrogant, or both - are they really surprised that kernel maintainers would get pissed off at someone deliberately wasting their time? From the post: * Does this project waste certain efforts of maintainers? Unfortunately, yes. We would like to sincerely apologize to the maintainers involved in the corresponding patch review process; this work indeed wasted their prec…

Or more charitably: "Yes, this spent some maintainers time, but only a small amount and it resulted in bugfixes, which is par for the course of contributing to linux"

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#707

This 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 mean I understand that people in academia are becoming increasingly disconnected from the real world, but wow this is low. I don't have data to back this up, but I've been around a while and I can tell you papers are rejected from conferences for ethics violations. My personal observation is that infosec/cybersecurity academia has been steadily moving to higher ethical standards in research. That doesn't mean that…

[deleted]

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#710

This is supremely fucked up and I’d say is borderline criminal. It’s really lucky asshole researchers like this haven’t caused a bug that cost billions of dollars, or killed someone, because eventually shit like this will... and holy shit will “it was just research” do nothing to save them.

Any organization that would deploy software that could kill someone without carefully personally reviewing it for fitness of purpose especially when the candidate software states that it waives all liability and waives any guarantee that it is fit for purpose as stated in sections 11 and 12 of the GPLv2 [1] is criminally irresponsible. Though it is scummy to deliberately introduce defects into a OSS project, any defects that result in a failure to perform are both ethically and legally completely on whoever is using Linux in a capacity that can cost billions of dollars or kill someone.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html

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