Somehow I feel that wasting some developer time in a situation where informing all the parties involved would have probably undermined the research itself, is a lot less of a ethical breach than full blown coerced human experimentation with permanent effects on those people's lives, which this research is being compared to. The outrage on HN about this experiment has been mind-boggling to me, how sacred people hold keeping the Linux kernel and its maintainers' time pristine. And ultimately it seems that the research was useful, given the blast radius it produced.