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How is such a ban going to be effective? The "researchers" could easily continue their experiments using different credentials, right?
by kleiba 6y ago
How is such a ban going to be effective? The "researchers" could easily continue their experiments using different credentials, right?
- NtrllyIntrstd 6y agoI think it is more of a message than a solution
- krig 6y agoThus moving from merely unethical to actually fraudulent? Although from the email exchanges it seems they are already making fraudulent statements... At least it might prompt the University to take action against the researchers.
- rrmm 6y agoThe ban is aimed more at the UMN dept overseeing the reserach than at preventing continued "experiments." I imagine it would also make continued experiments even more unethical.
- unmole 6y agoAny data collected from such "research" would be unpublishable and therefore worthless.
- notyourday 6y ago> How is such a ban going to be effective? It trashes University of Minnesota in the press. What is going to happen is that the president of the university now is going to hear about it, so will the provost and so will people in charge of doling money. That will rapidly fix the professor problem. While people may think that tenure professors get to do what they want, they never win in a war with a president and a provost. That professor is toast. And so are his researchers
- chaosite 6y agoThe professor's site says that he is an assistant professor, i.e., he doesn't actually have tenure yet.
- voidfunc 6y agoWell his career is over. He's now unemployable in academia.
- pumaontheprowl 6y agoOh no, now he'll just have to make twice the salary in private industry. We really stuck it to him.
- nodja 6y agoI believe this is so that the university treats the reports seriously. It's basically a "shit's broken, fix it". The researchers are probably under a lot of pressure from the rest of the university right now.
- LegitShady 6y agoTheir whole department/university just got officially banned. If they attempt to circumvent that, the authorities would probably be involved due to fraud.
- darig 6y agoIf you're a young hacker that wants to get into kernel development as a career, are you going to consider going to a university that has been banned from officially participating in development for arguably the most prolific kernel? The next batch of "researchers" won't be attending the University of Minnesota, and other universities scared of the same fate (missing out on tuition money) will preemptively ban such research themselves. "Effective" isn't binary, and this is a move in the right direction.
- neatze 6y agoThe kernel that runs on mars now and on home/work desktops.
- ajross 6y agoArbitrary anonymous submissions don't go into the kernel in general. The point[1] behind the Signed-off-by line is to associate a physical human being with real contact information with the change. One of the reason this worked is likely that submissions from large US research universities get a "presumptive good faith" pass. A small company in the PRC, for an example, might see more intensive review. But given the history of open source, we trust graduate students maybe more than we should. [1] Originally legal/copyright driven and not a security feature, though it has value in both domains.
- Cpoll 6y ago> A small company in the PRC, for an example, might see more intensive review. Which is a bit silly, isn't it? Grad students are poor and overworked, it seems easy to find one to trick/bribe into signing off your code, if you wanted to do something malicious.
- whatshisface 6y agoWell, there's nothing easier to corrupt than a small company (not just in the PRC), because you could found one specifically to introduce vulnerabilities without breaking any laws in any country I know of.
- angry_octet 6y agoGrad students have invested years of their life, for no reward, in research on a niche topic. Any ding to their reputation will adversely effect their entire career. I doubt this guy would get a post doc fellowship anywhere after this.
- Cpoll 6y ago> Any ding to their reputation will adversely effect their entire career. If this is foolproof, then no-one should be talking about the replication crisis. People don't do bad things _expecting_ to be caught, if they haven't already convinced themselves they're not doing anything bad at all. And I suspect it's surprisingly easy to convince people that they won't get caught.