| Does nobody here even understand what actually happened? Really losing my faith in the accuracy of HN if such a huge thread is full of misinformation. Basically (as I understand it, feel free to correct me) this is what happened: Researcher emailed maintained with flawed code, maintainer LGTMed it, researcher told maintainer that the code is buggy and not to merge it. The researchers confirmed that the code was not merged or commited anywhere. Paper gets published. Nothing of note happens. Now, one of the researchers grad students has submitted stuff to linux oh his own volition- he does not appear to be associated with the previous research. These commits are "obviously bad" according to linux maintainers and claim that the grad student is just continuing the "merge bad shit" research. These commits do not appear to be intentionally flawed but rather newbie mistakes (so claims the student)- which is why he feels the linux community is unwelcoming to newcomers. Now how on earth did that warp to whatever everyone here is smoking? |
The paper you’re referring to was from last year. Two of the three patches that they emailed in under fake author names were rejected; they wrote a paper about the experience. All that happened as a result was that everybody told them that it was a terrible idea, and they tweaked the wording of the paper a bit.
Now _this_ year, a different PHD student with the same advisor posted a really dubious patch which would introduce one or more use–after–free bugs. This patch was also rejected by the maintainers. Greg noticed that it looks like another attempt to do the same kind of experiment again. Nobody but them know if that’s true or not, but the student reacted by calling it “slander”, which was not very advisable.
The methodology in the original paper had one redeeming feature; after any patch was accepted, they would immediately email back withdrawing the patch. That doesn’t appear to have happened in this case, but then this patch was rejected.
As a result of this, all future contributions from people affiliated with UMN are being rejected, and all past contributions (about 250) are being reviewed. Most of those are simply being backed out wholesale, unless someone speaks up for individual changes. A handful of those changes have already been vouched for.
That is pretty drastic, because there will certainly be acceptable patches that will need to be re–reviewed and possibly recommitted. On the other hand, if you discover a malicious actor, wouldn’t you want to investigate everything they’ve been involved with? On the gripping hand, there are such things as autoimmune diseases.
I guess we’ll have to see how it plays out.