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A university got itself banned from the Linux kernel (2021)

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Re: A university got itself banned from the Linux kernel (2021)

#5

Post by arjie »

The ultimate problem is that it's easy to fake stuff so you have to use heuristics to see who you can trust. You sort of sum up your threat score and then decide how much attention to apply. Without doing something like that, the transaction costs dominate and certain valuable things can't be done. It's true that Western universities are generally a positive component to that score and students under a professor there are another positive component to the score.

It's like if my wife said "I'm taking the car to get it washed" and then she actually takes the car to the junkyard and sells it. "Ha, you got fooled!". I mean, yes, obviously. She's on the inside of my trust boundary and I don't want to live a life where I'm actually operating in a way immune to this 'exploit'.

I get that others object to the human experimentation part of things and so on, but for me that could be justified with a sufficiently high bar of utility. The problem is that this research is useless.

Re: A university got itself banned from the Linux kernel (2021)

#6

Post by jovial_cavalier »

gnabgib wrote: post #2

(2021) Discussion at the time (3025 points, 1954 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670

The authors were 100% in the right, and GKH was 100% in the wrong. It's very amusing to go back and read all of the commenters calling for the paper authors to face criminal prosecution. The fact is that they provided a valuable service and exposed a genuine issue with kernel development policies. Their work reflected poorly on kernel maintainers, and so those maintainers threw a hissy fit and brigaded the community against them.

Also, banning umn.edu email addresses didn't even make sense since the hypocrite commits were all from gmail addresses.

Re: A university got itself banned from the Linux kernel (2021)

#7

Post by jovial_cavalier »

arjie wrote: post #5

The ultimate problem is that it's easy to fake stuff so you have to use heuristics to see who you can trust. You sort of sum up your threat score and then decide how much attention to apply. Without doing something like that, the transaction costs dominate and certain valuable things can't be done. It's true that Western universities are generally a positive component to that score and students under a professor ther…

No, random anonymous contributors with cheng3920845823@gmail.com as their email address are not as trustworthy as your wife, and blindly merging PRs from them into some of the most security-critical and widely used code in the entire world without so much as running a static analyzer is not reasonable.

Re: A university got itself banned from the Linux kernel (2021)

#8

Post by paultopia »

Woah, the thing that leapt out at me, as a professor, is that they somehow got an exemption from the UMN institutional review board. Uh, how?? It's clearly human subjects research under the conventional federal definition[1] and obviously posed a meaningful risk of harm, in addition to being conducted deceptively. Someone has to have massively been asleep at the wheel at that IRB.

[1] https://grants.nih.gov/policy-and-compliance/policy-topics/h...

Re: A university got itself banned from the Linux kernel (2021)

#9

Post by tptacek »

paultopia wrote: post #8

Woah, the thing that leapt out at me, as a professor, is that they somehow got an exemption from the UMN institutional review board. Uh, how?? It's clearly human subjects research under the conventional federal definition[1] and obviously posed a meaningful risk of harm, in addition to being conducted deceptively. Someone has to have massively been asleep at the wheel at that IRB. [1] https://grants.nih.gov/policy-an…

The whole story is a good example of why there are IRBs in the first place --- in any story not about this Linux kernel fiasco people generally cast them as the bad guys.

Re: A university got itself banned from the Linux kernel (2021)

#10

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jovial_cavalier wrote: post #6
gnabgib wrote: post #2

(2021) Discussion at the time (3025 points, 1954 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670

The authors were 100% in the right, and GKH was 100% in the wrong. It's very amusing to go back and read all of the commenters calling for the paper authors to face criminal prosecution. The fact is that they provided a valuable service and exposed a genuine issue with kernel development policies. Their work reflected poorly on kernel maintainers, and so those maintainers threw a hissy fit and brigaded the community…

> Also, banning umn.edu email addresses didn't even make sense since the hypocrite commits were all from gmail addresses.

The blanket ban was kicked off by another incident after the hypocrite commit incident.

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