Yep, sorry, I double-checked and edited it quickly. Sorry about that!

> Their graduates have zero culpability here

It's not about guilt, it's about trust. They were trained for years in an institution that violates trust as a matter of course. That makes them suspect and the judgement completely fair.

Their graduates might not have been directly involved, but it's not possible to ig ore that those graduates were the product of an academic environment where this kind of behavior was not only sanctioned from the top but also defended as an adequate use of resources.

It makes perfect sense once you realize that universities are in the business of selling reputation.

When someone graduates from the university, that is the same as the university saying "This person is up to our standards in terms of knowledge, ethics and experience."

If those standards for ethics are very low, then it naturally taints that reputation they sold.

Linux kernel is blocking contributions from the university mail addresses, as this attack has been conducted by sending patches from there.

It doesn't block patch submissions from students of professors using their private email, since that assumes they are contributing as individuals, and not as employees or students.

It's as close as practically possible to blocking an institution and not the individuals.

I think current context of the world as it is is full of unjustified and unjust generalization.

And as unfortunate as it sound it look like all victim of such generalization, the alumni would have to fight the prejudice associated to their choice of university.

It's discomforting to see "bad apple" metaphor being used to say "isolated instance with no influence to its surroundings".

That is exact opposite of how rot in literal bunch of apples behave. Spoil spreads throughout the whole lot very, very quickly.

Undoubtedly I am in the minority here, but I think it's less a question of ethics, and more a question of bad judgement. You just don't submit vulnerabilities into the kernel and then say "hey, I just deliberately submitted a security vulnerability".

The chief problem here is not that it bruises the egos of the Linux developers for being psyched, but that it was a dick move whereby people now have to spend time sorting this shit out.

Prof Liu miscalculated. The Linux developers are not some randos off the street where you can pay them a few bucks for a day in the lab, and then they go away and get on with whatever they were doing beforehand. It's a whole community. And he just pissed them off.

It is right that Linux developers impose a social sanction on the perpetrators.

It has quite possibly ruined the student's chances of ever getting a PhD, and earned Liu a rocket up the arse.

Ah, so people do actually use the expression backwards like that. I had seen many people complain about other people saying “just a few bad apples”, but I couldn’t remember actually seeing anyone use the “one/few bad apple(s)” phrase as saying that it doesn’t cause or indicate a larger problem.

> A bad apple does not spoil the bunch, as it were.

What? That's exactly how it works. A bad apple gives off a lot of ethylene which ripens (spoils) the whole bunch.