This was pretty a pretty brazen breach of responsibility by these researchers. The fact that they exposed end users to risk and appear to not have clued in the

This was pretty a pretty brazen breach of responsibility by these researchers. The fact that they exposed end users to risk and appear to not have clued in the upper levels of kernel development were serious lapses. While code of ethics and ethical are a review, it doesn't appear that there is much in the way of help for experimental design that could have helped the researchers do this in a smarter way from the start. That said, I believe the punishment for the failing here should be measured. I don't think they should just blatantly fire a professor for doing this, though a severe reprimand is in order. Also, banning an entire university could probably be toned down a bit. The end result of this will hopefully be much more in-depth code review, better tests, better fuzzing, and more deployment of static analysis tools that can catch errors like this.