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0 pointsjfim4y ago0 comments

I'd disagree. Organizations are collections of actors, some of which may have malicious intents. As long as the organization itself does not condone this type of behavior, has mechanisms in place to prevent such behavior, and has actual consequences for malicious actors, then the blame should be placed on the individual, not the organization.

In the case of research, universities are required to have an ethics board that reviews research proposals before actual research is conducted. Conducting research without an approval or misrepresenting the research project to the ethics board are pretty serious offenses.

Typically for research that involves people, participants in the research require having a consent form that is signed by participants, alongside a reminder for participants that they can withdraw that consent at any time without any penalties. It's pretty interesting that in this case, there seemed to have been no real consent required, and it would be interesting to know whether there has been an oversight by the ethics board or a misrepresentation of the research by the researchers.

It will be interesting to see whether the university applies a penalty to the professor (removal of tenure, termination, suspension, etc.) or not. The latter would imply that they're okay with unethical or misrepresented research being associated with their university, which would be pretty surprising.

In any case, it's a good thing that the Linux kernel maintainers decided that experimenting on them isn't acceptable and disrespectful of their contributions. Subjecting participants to experiments without their consent is a severe breach of ethical duty, and I hope that the university will apply the correct sanctions to the researchers and instigators.

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dumpsterdiver4y ago

Good points. I should have qualified my statement by saying that IMO the ban should stay in place for at least five years. A prison sentence, if you will, for the offense that was committed by their organization. I completely agree with you though that no organization can have absolute control over the humans working for them, especially your point about misrepresenting intentions. However, I believe that by handing out heavy penalties like this, not only will it make organizations think twice before approving questionable research, it will also help prevent malicious researchers from engaging in this type of activity. I don't imagine it's going to look great being the person who got an entire university banned from committing to the Linux kernel.

Of course, in a few years this will all be forgotten. It begs the question... how effective is it to ban entire organizations due to the actions of a few people? Part of me thinks that it would very good to have something like this happen every five years (because it puts the maintainers on guard), but another part of me recognizes that these maintainers are working for free, and they didn't sign up to be gaslighted, they signed up to make the world a better place. It's not an easy problem.

jfimOP4y ago

I agree. I don't think any of the kernel developers ever signed up for reviewing malicious patches done by people who managed to sneak their research project past the ethics board, and it's not really fair to them to have to deal with that. I'm pretty sure they have enough work to do already without having to deal with additional nonsense.

I don't think it's unreasonable for maintainers of software to ignore or outright ban problematic users/contributors. It's up to them to manage their software project the way they want, and if banning organizations with malicious actors is the way to do it, the more power to them.

btilly4y ago

It turns out that the Associate Department Head was engaged in similar "research" on Wikipedia over a dozen years ago, and that also caused problems. The fact that they are here again suggests a broader institutional problem.