University Banned From Contributing To Linux Kernel For Intentionally Inserting Bugs

[Jumbotron]

I wonder if we will find out either....

A: They are Anti-SJW RADICALS who support JMS and all things asshole for the sake of assholiness.

B: They or their department have ties with Microsoft, SCO, or a patent troll company tied to either Microsoft or SCO.

C: All of the above.

[torsionbar28]

Now imagine if the same contributions were made by a Chinese university...

That's why the CCP sends their researchers to the US, as they did in this case, to mask their malicious activity under the guise of US University research.

[szymon_g]

so, lemmie put it straight: they have introduced shady patches that were accepted into the mainline, they wrote a paper about intorducing bugs into the kernel and when the truth came out, it is them who are baddies in that story?

[mos87]

Minnesota is a shifty place

[szymon_g]

publishing vulnerability papers and developing viruses and malware.

good for them then. maybe it will force developers to focus more on security?

[User42]

Research like that is complex and much needed. The thing is, if it was well conducted it should have been done with knowledge/consent of at least a few important kernel people with a strict workflow to avoid actually releasing anything harmful (since releasing the code is not the point: introducing it is). It's really not nice to be considered as lab rats, I understand this represents wasted times and those specific researchers screwed up.

But they succeeded, at least initially. It's only after that paper being published that devs got wary of them. If anything, it proves that such research is needed to understand how this is happening and hopefully find tools/workflows to mitigate it. So yes, a couple men-hours were spent on reviewing those patches, that's harming the community... so would finding a major flaw/backdoor in the kernel.

Again, not saying this has been done in the best way possible but it's not like the devs are reviewing a significant amounts of "experimental" patches and it's useful in the long run.

Instead of just banning people, they should just say "if you want to attempt anything like this, please contact X to review what it is you want to do and how to avoid wasting time and blunders like this".

[microcode]

Good to see there is some spine still in the kernel community. If the University of Minnesota wants to make contributions now, they're going to need another level of maintainership: not a disaster for either party.

[Doomsdayrs]

Overall nice to see the kernel maintainers handling trolls nicely. Academic expulsion should be expected for the "researchers".

And, for the comments it seems we have a good deal of people spouting nonsense based on assumptions or reactionary terminology. And for those people, Most insurance companies cover therapy.

[carewolf]

Good Research paper, It exposes a lot of issues in Large Open Source Projects.
Instead of focusing on their deeds, they should focus on resolving those issues by introducing new strict policies for contributing code to a very sensitive project like Linux kernel.

Well, they did get detected, and the consequences is to ban people doing shit like that

[microcode]

Qiushi Wu and Kangjie Lu

FWIW Kangjie Lu is maybe from Singapore, and Qiushi Wu is an unknown quantity.