I back your decision and fuck these people. I will additionally be sending a strongly worded email to this person, their advisor and their whoever's in charge of this joke of a computer science school. Sometimes I wish we had the ABA equivalent for computer science.
Even if you're justifiably steaming about something, please wait to cool down before posting here.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26889743.
The way I understand it is that unnecessarily angry or confrontational posts tend to lower the overall tone. They are cathartic/fun to write, fast to write, and tend to get wide overall agreement/votes. So if they are allowed then most of the discussion on a topic gets pushed down beneath that sort of post.
Hence why we are asked to refrain, to permit more room for focused and substantive discussion.
The researchers should not have done this, but ultimately it's the faculty that must be held accountable for allowing this to happen in the first place. They are a for-profit institution and should not get away with harassing people who are contributing their personal time. So nail them to the proverbial cross but make sure the message is heard by those who slipped up (not the researchers who should have been stopped before it happened).
A real malicious actor is going to be planted in some reputable institution, creating errors that look like honest mistakes.
How do you test if the process catches such vulnerabilities? You do it the just the way that these researchers did.
Yes, it creates extra homework for some people with certain responsibilities, that doesn't mean it's unethical. Don't shoot the messenger.
They introduced a real vulnerability in a codebase that lowers world-wide cybersecurity used by billions so they could jerk themselves off over a research paper.
They are a real malicious actor and I hope they hit by the CFAA.
This was a bold and unwise exercise, especially if you’re an academic in country on a revocable visa who participated.
What's the process then? I doubt there is such a process for the Linux kernel, otherwise the response would've been "you did not follow the process" instead of "we don't like what you did there".
