2) I don't think it's unethical to send someone an email that has bad code in it. You shouldn't need an IRB to send emails.
It's unethical because of the bits you left out: sending code you know is bad, and doing so under false pretenses.
Whether or not you think this rises to the level of requiring IRB approval, surely you must be able to understand that wasting people's time like this is going to be viewed negatively by almost anyone. Some people might be willing to accept that doing this harm is worth it for the greater cause of the research, but that doesn't erase the harm done.
GKH's response was to waste man weeks or man months of maintainer time persecuting every last commit that happened to come from umn.edu, despite having zero reason to believe these commits were more suspect than any other institution's commits.
It's totally possible to obtain evidence of that without being an asshole to kernel maintainers. Which is the kind of thing that an ethics review conducted before the experiment could have pointed out. If the goal of the experiment was merely to demonstrate the lack of routine static analysis capable of catching such vulnerabilities, then the experiment's design was not justified and the experiment was needlessly harmful to non-consenting participants.
2) Yes, emails absolutely need IRB sign-off too. If you email a bunch of people asking for their health info or doing a survey, the IRB would smack you for unapproved human research without consent. Consent was obviously not given here.
[0] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/CADVatmNgU7t-Co84tSS6VW=3N...
2) I don't actually care about the internal policies of UMN's IRB. Whether or not the study's approval was proper and whether they would get into trouble with their boss is not my problem. The point is that what they did is obviously not immoral or unethical.
The "ethical" issues with this study do not rise to the level that I care, so the only objection is that they didn't get the IRB to rubber stamp it beforehand, which I also don't care about.
