University Banned From Contributing To Linux Kernel For Intentionally Inserting Bugs

phoronix.com

Posted by z3d in Linux

Greg Kroah-Hartman has banned a US university from trying to mainline Linux kernel patches over intentionally submitting questionable code with security implications and other "experiments" in the name of research.

Stemming from a research paper where researchers from the University of Minnesota intentionally worked to stealthy introduce vulnerabilities into the mainline Linux kernel. They intentionally introduced use-after-free bugs into the kernel covertly for their research paper.

But even after this paper, there has been a new round of patches from University of Minnesota researchers that claim to come from "a new static analyzer" but without any real value to the patches. These new, questionable patches don't appear to have any real value -- for good or bad -- and at the very least are just wasting time by upstream developers. This has led Greg to calling them out and "banning" them from trying to contribute to the Linux kernel in the future.

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takeheart wrote

An open-source project is effectively a private venue, capable of banning people and enacting arbitrary rules within the limits of local anti-discrimination statutes.

Nobody has a right to have their patches be considered, just like no magazine or newspaper has an obligation to consider your submission. Your right is to make a fork or patchset if you don't like how the project is being managed.

The Linux kernel is the "Benevolent dictatorship"

The cult shows it's ugly face. jewkipedia also tried "benevolent dictatorship" card, and how did that worked out?

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BlackWinnerYoshi wrote

You mean the freetardist cult? (considering the userland is GNU and that the licence of the Linux kernel is GPLv2, that is probably the case)

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takeheart wrote

Yes, that one. Here is less argument more lament wall of text that I liked.

Beginning, automatic computing was created to save human labour and to provide correct answers; this axiom has been forgotten, and people no longer truly understand for what reasons computers exist. A computer is not a series of digital levers, sparing users from flipping them by hand, but ability to have one lever flip activate all or none, or any other pattern the machine can be taught; following, the machine could be taught the meta-patterns of stimuli relating to these patterns, and to activate them automatically, soon running autonomously, until encountering situations so new a human operator must tell it how to proceed. The goal isn't to flip levers, but to be able to entirely forget them. Thus, when a man spends hours flipping digital levers, it's such an obscene act, against the spirit.

My chosen forgotten realms pursued this spirit of decreasing human labour. The fiefdoms, liars, and cults act against it. It would be inappropriate to express this disgust with computing history, and not mention UNIX, brimming with all three groups. It's responsible for teaching countless people to bend themselves to the machine, never daring to customize it in certain trivial ways, and then pride themselves on this obscenity; the liars claim it was the first operating system written in a higher-level language, they claim it had the first hierarchical file system, they claim an operating system panicking is perfectly reasonable behaviour, they claim doing something once in the operating system is worse than doing it in every program that uses it, they claim things must be this way or similar, and they claim yet other vicious lies; and those fiefdoms are built on these foundations, justifying complicated languages by making comparisons to the natural sciences despite there needing be no such complications in a human construct, taking joy in writing incomprehensible programs, and mocking the people with the good sense to look upon them with disgust, amongst other ways these fiefdoms attempt to maintain their social control in spite of evidence. Those who could stop them don't know better.

I'm forced to wonder if all wondrous technology goes through a phase such as computing currently is, in which humans create it, and idiots build a community around needlessly abusing it. Did operators of early printing presses forget what that tool was for, or find it fine to print illegibly given it was good enough; I know none of these incompetent programmers would enjoy it were operators of their water infrastructure behaving so carelessly, retorting that an advanced user always boils his water.

http://verisimilitudes.net/2020-09-24

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