alt Hacker NewsNo, random anonymous contributors with [email protected] as their email address are not as trustworthy as your wife, and blindly merging PRs from them into some of the most security-critical and widely used code in the entire world without so much as running a static analyzer is not reasonable.
Oh I misunderstood the sections in the article about the umn.edu email stuff. My mistake. The actual course of events:
1. Prof and students make fake identities
2. They submit these secret vulns to Greg KH and friends
3. Some of these patches are accepted
4. They intervene at this point and reveal that the patches are malicious
5. The patches are then not merged
6. This news comes out and Greg KH applies big negative trust score to umn.edu
7. Some other student submits a buggy patch to Greg KH
8. Greg KH assumes that it is more research like this
9. Student calls it slander
10. Greg KH institutes policy for his tree that all umn.edu patches should be auto-rejected and begins reverts for all patches submitted in the past by such emails
To be honest, I can't imagine any other such outcome could have occurred. No one likes being cheated out of work that they did, especially when a lot of it is volunteer work. But I was wrong to say the research was useless. It does demonstrate that identities without provenance can get malicious code into the kernel.
Perhaps what we really need is a Social Credit Score for OSS ;)