Unbelievable that this could have passed ethics review, so I'd bet it was never reviewed. Big black eye for University of Minnesota. Imagine if you are another doctoral student is CS/EE and this tool has ruined your ability to participate in Linux.
didn't we learn a lot from nazi/japanese experiments from ww2?
Though what a lot is is also open to question. Much of what we learned isn't that useful to real world problems. However some has been important.
are there more impactful benefits that aren't listed on the wikipedia page? It sounds like the main research contribution is philosophical discussions over whether or not it would be okay to use the data if someone had a good reason for it.
The goal of military is to protect or conquer. The goal of science is to find the truth, and the goal of the engineering is to offer solutions. Any of the true leaders in either fields knows there're more efficient means/systems to get those goals, even in ww2 era.
And ultimately, we know what their priorities were and what kind of worldview they were operating under, so the odds are bad that any given experiment they ran would have been rigorous enough to produce results that could be reproduced in other studies and applied elsewhere. I'm not personally aware of any major breakthroughs that would have been impossible without the "aid" of eugenicist war criminals, though it's possible there's some major example I'm missing.
We certainly did bring over lots of German scientists to work on nukes and rockets, so your question is not entirely off-base - but I suspect almost everyone involved in those choices would argue that rocketry research isn't unethical.
> But they can't then use that type of "hiding" to get away with claiming it was done for a University research project as that's even more unethical than what they are doing now.
Other CS labs at UMN, well... apparently not so much.
A good example is challenge testing Covid vaccines. This was widely deemed to be unethical despite large numbers of volunteers. Perhaps a million lives could have been saved if we had vaccines a few months sooner.
Research without ethics (as currently practiced) can have value.
Issue (2) arose with the EU response to rare AZ/J+J side effects, where I believe the EU is more deserving of criticism. They will undoubtedly cause more deaths in their own populations and throughout the world than would occur from clotting complications, but no one will hold them to account. But they weighed their equities as more important than global benefit.
