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Comment by karlding | Hacker News Reader

The University of Minnesota's Department of Computer Science and Engineering released a statement [0] and "suspended this line of research".

[0] https://cse.umn.edu/cs/statement-cse-linux-kernel-research-a...

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They don’t seem all that happy about it. :)

I don’t read any emotion in that statement whatsoever.

> We take this situation extremely seriously. We have immediately suspended this line of research. yeah those department heads seemed pretty pissed

According to the "Hypocrite Commits" paper by Qiushi Wu, UMN specifically approved this research, granting IRB exemption.

https://github.com/QiushiWu/QiushiWu.github.io/blob/main/pap...

See section VI-A (page 8).

That doesn't conflict with the statement. If the IRB looks at something and exempts it, it has no reason to report that to the hierarchy in any way, because that's a routine process.

Not sure how this university is run but this doesn't sound plausible to me.

>... learned today about the details of research being conducted by one of its faculty members and graduate students into the security of the Linux Kernel

And this sounds like mainly a lot of damage control is going to happen.

>We will report our findings back to the community as soon as practical.

Why does it sound implausible? In any uni I've interacted with, profs did pretty much their own thing and without a reason very little attention is paid to how they do it (or even what they do).

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