[powersnail]

They should not have experimented on human subjects without consent, regardless of whether the result is considered benign.

Yes, malicious actors have a head start, because they don't care about the rules. It doesn't mean that we should all kick the rules, and compete with malicious actors on this race to the bottom.

[d110af5ccf]

I'm not aware of any law requiring consent in cases such as this, only conventions enforced by IRBs and journal submission requirements.

I also don't view unannounced penetration testing of an open source project as immoral, provided it doesn't consume an inordinate amount of resources or actually result in any breakage (ie it's absolutely essential that such attempts not result in defects making it into production).

When the Matrix servers were (repeatedly) breached and the details published, I viewed it as a Good Thing. Similarly, I view non-consensual and unannounced penetration testing of the Linux kernel as a Good Thing given how widely deployed it is. Frankly I don't care about the sensibilities of you or anyone else - at the end of the day I want my devices to be secure and at this point they are all running Linux.

[powersnail]

I don’t see where I claim that this is a legal matter. There are many things which are not prohibited by law that you can do to a fellow human being that are immoral and might result in them blacklisting you forever.

That you care about something or not also seems to be irrelevant, unless you are part of either the research or the kernel maintainers. It’s not about your or my emotional inclination.

Acquiring consent before experimenting in human subject is an ethical requirement for research, regardless of whether is a hurdle for the researchers. There is a reason that IRB exists.

Not to mention that they literally proved nothing, other than that vulnerable patches can be merged into the kernel. But did anybody that such a threat is impossible anyway? The kernel has vulnerabilities and it will continue to have them. We already knew that.

[salawat]

>I view non-consensual and unannounced penetration testing of the Linux kernel as a Good Thing...

So what other things do you think appropriate to not engage in acquiring consent to do based on some perceived justification of ubiquity? It's a slippery slope all the way down, and there is a reason for all the ceremony and hoopla involved in this type of thing. If you cannot demonstrate mastery of doing research on human subjects and processes the right way, and show you've done your footwork to consider the impact of not doing it that way (i.e. IRB fully engaged, you've gone out of your way to make sure they understand, and at least reached out to one person in the group under test to give a surreptitious heads up (like Linus)), you have no business playing it fast and loose, and you absolutely deserve censure.

No points awarded for half-assing. Asking forgiveness may oft times be easier than asking permission, but in many areas, the impact to doing so goes far beyond mere inconvenience to the researcher in the costs it can extract.

>at the end of the day I want my devices to be secure and at this point they are all running Linux.

That is orthogonal to the outcome of the research that was being done, as by definition running Linux would include running with a new vulnerability injected. What you really want is to know your device is doing what you want it to, and none of what you don't. Screwing with kernel developers does precious little to accomplish that. Same logic applies with any other type of bug injection or intentioned software breakage.

[matkoniecz]

> I'm not aware of any law requiring consent in cases such as this

In the same way there is no law requiring Linux kernel maintainers to review patches send by this university.

"it was not literally illegal" is not a good reasoning for why someone should not be banned.