@luna@cutie.city @ioletsgo Basically what happened was the University of Minnesota introduced a back door into the Linux kernel on purpose to try to see if it would actually make it through to production (which I believe it did). When confronted by the community, they proposed the experiment and that it was sanctioned by the head researchers in their IT department.
From there they were banned from ever contributing to Linux ever again, as well as those particular people involved with the incident were also forbidden from contributing.
@shi@temmie19 @luna@cutie.city the patches were never actually merged/commited, and were discarded by reviewers
ignoring the ethics violations and breach of trust, the whole research project was kind of nonsense, IMHO; "If I abuse the implicit trust you've elected to afford me to fascilitate our cooperation, can I harm you?" isn't a question that's hard to answer, or one that needs a secret, real-world test-case to prove.