“They introduce kernel bugs on purpose” • Hacker News Board

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#911

Post by slenk » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 12:36 AM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #403

returningfory2 wrote: post #395

Commenters have been reasonably accusing the researchers of bad practice, but I think there's another possible take here based on Hanlon's razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". If you look at the website of the PhD student involved [1], they seem to be writing mostly legitimate papers about, for example, using static analysis to find bugs. In this kind of research, having…

I suppose it depends on what you make of Greg's opinion (I am only vaguely familiar with this topic, so I have none). > They obviously were _NOT_ created by a static analysis tool that is of any intelligence, as they all are the result of totally different patterns, and all of which are obviously not even fixing anything at all. So what am I supposed to think here, other than that you and your group are continuing to…

I know this is old, but got a link? That LMKL thread is long

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#912

Post by calylex » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 12:39 AM UTC

Reminds me of "It's just a prank bro" video from Filthy Frank https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wldE_4xjVQ

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#913

Post by swat535 » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 12:42 AM UTC

NationalPark wrote: post #897

whack wrote: post #784

Let me play devil's advocate here. Such pen-testing is absolutely essential to the safety of our tech ecosystem. Countries like Russia, China and USA are without a doubt, doing exactly the same thing that this UMN professor is doing. Except that instead of writing a paper about it, they are going to abuse the vulnerabilities for their own nefarious purposes. Conducting such pen-tests, and then publishing the results…

We already know that good faith can be abused, it's practically implied in the phrase itself. There is nothing of value to be learned from this "research".

This research implies that the linux team should not be operating on good faith.

A software as critical as linux should not be this easily compromised by a bunch of grads..

It's one of the core technologies of our computing.

Having a discussion around the ethics of this is great but it does not detract from the importance of bigger issue.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#914

Post by jbirer » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 12:55 AM UTC

I am baffled by the immaturity and carelessness of experimenting on a kernel that millions of critical machines use, and I applaud the maintainers for dealing swiftly with this.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#915

Post by otde » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 1:04 AM UTC

slaw_pr wrote: post #764

It seems we hit another level of "progressive" stupidity and that has to be the most "woke" IT univ if they allow such BS to happen. Of course they deserve the ban. To be that stupid, self-centered and despise someone else's work to this extent, then play a victim - you need to be brainwashed by some university professor. Not to mention they confuse being friendly to beginners with tolerance for brainless parasites.…

This seems like a stretch. While the main culprit is couching their accusations of slander in accessibility-oriented language as a way to deflect, there’s little to suggest “wokeness” is at play here in any respect, and to imply otherwise kind of gives away that you’ve already settled on a “culture war” lens, regardless of how well that maps to the story’s context.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#916

Post by the_only_law » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 1:06 AM UTC

otde wrote: post #915

slaw_pr wrote: post #764

It seems we hit another level of "progressive" stupidity and that has to be the most "woke" IT univ if they allow such BS to happen. Of course they deserve the ban. To be that stupid, self-centered and despise someone else's work to this extent, then play a victim - you need to be brainwashed by some university professor. Not to mention they confuse being friendly to beginners with tolerance for brainless parasites.…

This seems like a stretch. While the main culprit is couching their accusations of slander in accessibility-oriented language as a way to deflect, there’s little to suggest “wokeness” is at play here in any respect, and to imply otherwise kind of gives away that you’ve already settled on a “culture war” lens, regardless of how well that maps to the story’s context.

Five hour old account posting flamebait, guess this is what HN is becoming.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#917

Post by 8bitsrule » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 1:16 AM UTC

Couldn't help themselves. Once they thought of it, they just had to Gopher it.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#918

Post by Zevis » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 1:31 AM UTC

duxup wrote: post #171

ENOTTY wrote: 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…

Seems like a bit of a strong response. Universities are large places with lots of professors and people with different ideas, opinions, views, and they don't work in concert, quite the opposite. They're not some corporation with some unified goal or incentives. I like that. That's what makes universities interesting to me. I don't like the standard here of of penalizing or lumping everyone there together, regardless…

It's the university that allowed the research to take place. It's the university's responsibility to fix their own organisation's issues. The kernel has enough on their plate than to have to figure out who at the university is trustworthy and who isn't considering their IRB is clearly flying blind.

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#919

Post by chandmk » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

I am wondering if Aditya didn't respond the way he did (using corporate lawyer's langauge), Greg would have not reached to this conclusion? I am a bit surprised by the entitlement he was showing. Why would anyone use those words despite sending a nonsense patch! What kind of defence he was thinking he had among a group of seasoned developers other than being honest about intentions? I wouldn't be surprised if his professor doesn't even know what he was doing!

Re: “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

#920

Post by goldenManatee » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 2:02 AM UTC

jl2718 wrote: post #105

I would check their ties to nation-state actors. In closed source, nobody would even check. Modern DevOps has essentially replaced manual code review with unit tests.

Yeah, state-actor scale sabotage was one of my first thoughts. And it gives me no joy to contemplate it.

Secondly, the researcher’s attitude sounds high and mighty - making process improvement suggestions when their own ethical compass is in question. Their “experiment” was “what would happen if...”. Well, bans happen. If one starts a fight don’t get indignant over a bloody nose, lol