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Comment by yiyus | Hacker News Reader

Why is the university where you put the line? You could as well say every commit coming from Minnesota is radioactive or, why not, from the US.

It is unfair to judge a whole university for the behavior of a professor or a department. Although I'm far from having all the details, it looks to me like the university is taking the right measures to solve the problem, which they acknowledge. I would understand your position if they tried to hide this or negated it, but as far as I understood that's not the case at all. Did I miss something?

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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 that is a reasonable measure by the LK team. In my opinion, it is the right solution in the short term, and the decision can be revised if in the future some student or someone else have problems to submit non-malicious patches. But I was specifically referring to this comment:

> As far as I'm concerned this university and all of its alumni are radioactive.

That is not a practical issue, but a too broad generalization (although, I repeat, I may have missed something).

I don't read it like this. Alumnis and students are not banned from contributing, as long as they use their private emails. It's the university email domain that is "radioactive". The Assumption here is that someone who uses university email is submitting a patch on behalf of the said university, and that may be in a bad faith. It's up to the said university to show they have controls in place and that they are trustworthy.

It's the same as with employees. If I get a patch request from xyz@ibm.com I'll assume that it comes from IBM, and that person is submitting a patch on behalf of IBM, while for a patch coming from xyz@gmail.com I would not assume any IBM affiliation or bias, but assume person contributing as an individual.

What if the same unethical people who ran the study submit patches from their gmail accounts?

> Alumnis and students are not banned from contributing, as long as they use their private emails. It's the university email domain that is "radioactive".

That's not what the comment I was responding to said. It was very clear: "As far as I'm concerned this university and all of its alumni are radioactive". It does not say every kernel patch coming from this domain is radioactive, it clearly says "all of its alumni are radioactive".

You said before that alumni from the university could submit patches with their private emails, but according to what djbebs said, he would not. Do we agree that this would be wrong?

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