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

Open letter from researchers involved in the “hypocrite commit” debacle

lore.kernel.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 384 posts

Re: Open letter from researchers involved in the “hypocrite commit” debacle

#191

Post by shkkmo »

thanhhaimai wrote: post #154
juliansimioni wrote: post #91

This apology fails from the 5th word: "We sincerely apologize for any harm..." While there are other requirements, a sincere apology cannot in any way entertain doubt about the fact that there WAS harm. Truly acknowledging the harm done is foundational to a real apology, and most of us (myself included) end up sneaking in weasel words or phrases like this. Psychologically, its nice for the apologizer, since it allows…

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I think it's both unfair and non-constructive to pick apart a apology letter based on one word like that. Let's assume good faith, especially when the writer's English might not be their first language (based on their name).

I read it as a comment that was criticizing the language, not the intention of the apology. As such they are not inferring that the apology was insincere but pointing out language that in the apology that the posted has often added themselves that gives the appearance of insincerity of the recipient. To me that is the strongest possible interpretation of the comment you are replying to.

Re: Open letter from researchers involved in the “hypocrite commit” debacle

#192

Post by sigstoat »

lasagnaphil wrote: post #119
sigstoat wrote: post #109

to the folks picking this apart word-by-word: all evidence suggests that two of the signatures are natives of china, and the third of india. it is reasonable to credit them with not being native english speakers.

You can write a good apology even with simple English. And since the researchers clearly have the ability to write papers in major English conferences this doesn’t seem to be a problem. It’s just that the apology doesn't do enough in what harm they have caused and what they are going to do in the future to prevent this harm.

> It’s just that the apology doesn't do enough in what harm they have caused and what they are going to do in the future to prevent this harm.

and that's fair! (also completely unrelated to what i said.)

and has nothing to do with individual word choices that they're being picked apart on, which would be subtle to even non-college educated english speakers.

> And since the researchers clearly have the ability to write papers in major English conferences this doesn’t seem to be a problem.

you're reading different conference papers than i, native-level english is not generally a requirement.

Re: Open letter from researchers involved in the “hypocrite commit” debacle

#193

Post by x3__ »

tmp538394722 wrote: post #171
nuclearnice1 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypocrite patches came from Gmail. Banned umn mail. Because that’s going to reduce risk?

It’s not so much that they banned umn email, as it is they banned the university of Minnesota. This particular act is about avoiding the risk of researchers wasting kernel developers time. As evinced by the response, it seems really unlikely that other institutions would think it’s a good idea to perform experiments on the kernel devs in the future.

You do know that one can contribute without having to use their institution email address ?

Re: Open letter from researchers involved in the “hypocrite commit” debacle

#194

Post by doomrobo »

darawk wrote: post #187
doomrobo wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consent is only relevant when there is some risk to the subject Says who? I don't think that's true according to IRB standards in the US. Nor is it true for websites who A/B test according to the GDPR

> Says who? Me and common sense. I don't believe consent is relevant when there is no risk of harm to the subject. IRBs and the GDPR are overly aggressive on this point, probably as a reaction to real and important violations of privacy. But the idea that A/B testing the color of your CTA button on a landing page requires informed consent is absurd.

There's lots of systemically horrible things that can happen if you're not careful about what you allow. If you're interested why these ethical principles exist in the United States, I suggest you at least skim the Belmont Report

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont_Report

Re: Open letter from researchers involved in the “hypocrite commit” debacle

#196

Post by trombonechamp »

darawk wrote: post #160
juliansimioni wrote: post #91

This apology fails from the 5th word: "We sincerely apologize for any harm..." While there are other requirements, a sincere apology cannot in any way entertain doubt about the fact that there WAS harm. Truly acknowledging the harm done is foundational to a real apology, and most of us (myself included) end up sneaking in weasel words or phrases like this. Psychologically, its nice for the apologizer, since it allows…

This is probably because they don't mean the apology, they were forced to write it by their administrators. And to be honest, I kind of agree with them. I don't really see what they did here as particularly bad. They demonstrated a very serious vulnerability in the linux kernel development process. I guess the harm they caused was wasting maintainers time, a bit? But what we all got out of it is the knowledge that re…

The purpose of the research was to publicly announce that that the research subjects (who did not consent to being studied) messed up. The research consisted of submitting patches specially crafted to make sure the (non-consenting) subjects did indeed mess up.

Re: Open letter from researchers involved in the “hypocrite commit” debacle

#197

Post by x3__ »

tmp538394722 wrote: post #178
voldacar wrote: post #30

Huge "I'm sorry I got caught" vibe. And it still refers to this malicious annoying behavior as "work" or "research", lmao

I mean, there’s all kinds of terrible unethical research. What makes you think this isn’t research?

Their paper got accepted to S&P 2021. That is the top conference in computer security in case one is not aware.

Not justifying what they did but this apparently is still research.

Re: Open letter from researchers involved in the “hypocrite commit” debacle

#198

Post by neatze »

ajarmst wrote: post #170
neatze wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your thoughts about this article[0], my reading or article is that; author fails in similar way (to some extent) as researchers and there's IRB in regards to ethics of such research. [0] https://dave-dittrich.medium.com/security-research-ethics-re...

It's an insightful review into some of the issues and regulations around this. I'm not American, so our local rules are different, and I resigned from my institution's IRB several years ago, and these issues have become more fraught in this period. However, the way I was trained to look at these issues were around the concepts of harm, both actual and potential. In this particular case, as Dittrich notes, the questio…

Thank you for such detailed response.

Can there be ethical possibility (highly remote one) where an study (assuming it is objectively justified) conducted with deception, but without prior informed consent at all. (eg. human subjects will not know that there's time is used for another purpose)

Re: Open letter from researchers involved in the “hypocrite commit” debacle

#199

Post by shkkmo »

astrange wrote: post #40
justinjlynn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. This letter is an attempt to justify and rationalise their actions. Essentially, it amounts to saying "we're sorry you were offended and felt hurt by our legitimate work but we had no choice but to lie to you and unethically experiment on you without your consent or we wouldn't have been able to do it". Their statement is not an actual apology, even if it is phrased in the language of apology, and it is an ex…

People love to analyze apologies after the fact, but it seems totally unfair to me. Once someone has said an apology you can take the text of it and turn it into anything you want and say it proves they were lying.

An good apology needs to demonstrate an understanding of why what was done was wrong and ideally includes concrete steps that will prevent anything similar from happening again.

You seem to be implying that one apology is as good as another and that is absolutely not true. To me is is absolutely unfair to expect that people will treat a zero effort "sorry your feelings were hurt" apology the same as a deeply heartfelt apology by someone who feels deep remorse.

By it's nature, an apology should be an act of making amends to a person your have wronged. If the words of your apology don't do that, you have failed, even if you had good intentions.

If the author of the apology isn't a native speaker of english, this seems like a document of sufficient significance to merit asking a friend or colleague for a proofread. (Which you should do in a case like this even if English is your first language.)

Re: Open letter from researchers involved in the “hypocrite commit” debacle

#200

Post by thaumasiotes »

Bootvis wrote: post #182
lynndotpy wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a nitpick to me, since the rest of the apology uses the proper choices of words, though. "The method used was inappropriate", "we made a mistake", etc. The apology is also specific about what they did wrong despite their intentions. It really is a good apology after reading past the first six words.

ESL here. How correct is it to use ’any harm’ to mean ‘all harm’.

That depends on the sentence context.[1] As used here it is fully correct; "we sincerely apologize for all harm our research group did" would be highly anomalous, whereas the phrasing they actually used is conventional.

"We sincerely apologize for all the harm our research group did" would be a little less unnatural than "...for all harm...", but it's still an unusual choice of wording that ends up sounding like you want to emphasize that you did an unusually large amount of harm.

A more standard phrasing that includes the word all would be "We apologize for any and all harm...".

The standard form I know is actually "[I am deeply sorry] for any harm I may have caused..."; the letter here does not use a modalized verb. (Compare their "We sincerely apologize for any harm our research group did...".) In that sense it's more definite than usual. The criticism above is strange.

(The reason for the modality in the standard form isn't really to leave open the possibility that you didn't do any harm. It's to leave open the possibility that you did harm you don't even know about -- and therefore can't apologize for specifically.)

[1] In general, any occurs only in negative sentences, though in the details there are several types of sentences that are sort of "honorarily negative" for the purposes of allowing any and other words that obey the same restrictions.

Post reply on HN