QOTW2: Busted

[Posted April 6, 2016 by corbet]

No I am not Nick Krause. I am just aware of how he got banned a few years ago. That email was a mistake by typo and was hoping nobody picked it up as they would then believe I was Nick Krause.

— "Bastien Philbert"

    Received: from [192.168.0.11]
        (CPEbc4dfb2691f3-CMbc4dfb2691f0.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com. [99.231.110.121])
        by smtp.gmail.com with ESMTPSA id w69sm1687054qhw.3.2016.04.06.10.23.24
    	(version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=OTHER); Wed, 06 Apr 2016 10:23:25 -0700 (PDT)

— from the message headers

    Received: from [192.168.0.11]
 	(CPEbc4dfb2691f3-CMbc4dfb2691f0.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com. [99.231.110.121])
	 by smtp.googlemail.com with ESMTPSA id o201sm11982708ioe.15.2016.02.22.12.12.53
	 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=OTHER); Mon, 22 Feb 2016 12:12:53 -0800 (PST)

— from an earlier message from Nick

QOTW2: Busted

Posted Apr 7, 2016 3:32 UTC (Thu) by kenmoffat (subscriber, #4807) [Link] (1 responses)

LOL

(Adding extra text because less than 10 characters gets the response:)

· There appears to be no text here! (less than 10 characters)

And to Nick (or whatever your real name is): Goodbye.

QOTW2: Busted

Posted Apr 7, 2016 6:06 UTC (Thu) by juston_li (subscriber, #104392) [Link]

Not enough data for his university thesis?

QOTW2: Busted

Posted Apr 7, 2016 7:12 UTC (Thu) by lkurusa (guest, #97704) [Link]

I didn't realize I would live to see his name on the front of the kernel page...

As funny as it is, part of me wishes we could use their enthusiasm somehow...

QOTW2: Busted

Posted Apr 7, 2016 19:58 UTC (Thu) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (7 responses)

Being banned from a project happens rarely, but I guess it's not unique. (In this case the ban is for a mailing list. A number of senior developers also claim to have added this person to their kill files.)

But trying so desperately and for so long to circumvent a ban must be unique.

I think this has been going on for two years now. What's next? A court order to force this person to stop interacting with the Linux kernel developers?

QOTW2: Busted

Posted Apr 8, 2016 2:13 UTC (Fri) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] (6 responses)

What's next? A court order to force this person to stop interacting with the Linux kernel developers?

Hopefully no court would grant that. His objectively harmless activity is a side-effect of his mental illness and thus unlikely to stop because of a court order. Upon breaching such a court order Mr Kruse would become just another statistic in the over-representation of the mentally ill in the US criminal justice system.

Other public institutions have to suck up interacting with the mentally ill, the Linux kernel community will have to learn to do the same. To date, and to its credit, the LKML has behaved well.

QOTW2: Busted

Posted Apr 8, 2016 2:42 UTC (Fri) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (2 responses)

Is that a fact? Mind proving that such a diagnosis is a matter of public record? Because if it's not, declarative statements like that are _really_ asking for trouble, whether they are true or false...

QOTW2: Busted

Posted Apr 8, 2016 13:44 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I don't think that the point made hinges on whether this person is officially diagnosed or not, so your criticism doesn't change the argument either way, this person's behavior is clearly disruptive and the point is that the world has many people some of whom are problematic but that the law isn't going to get involved to _make_ people behave in all cases so we have to learn to tolerate some amount of disruptive behavior ourselves.

QOTW2: Busted

Posted Apr 11, 2016 13:39 UTC (Mon) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link]

Yes, please, learn to say "crackpots" in the future. This is clearly the preferred nomenclature, and inclusive of various other kinds of crackpot who're not (yet) diagnosed with actual mental illness -- such as the combination of cynicism and political ambition. Waffling about "disruptivity" only legitimizes the "we should have these awful, awful white men cast^Wchaperoned by force!" crowd at cost to easily-maligned eccentrics.

That's to say: "mental illness" doesn't cause a Krause, and its absence doesn't prevent one.

QOTW2: Busted

Posted Apr 8, 2016 9:11 UTC (Fri) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (1 responses)

> objectively harmless activity

That's not correct. A bizarre amount of time has already been spent, collectively, on handling this person's patches. All that for, I guess, a handful of trivial commits, many of which even needed a few attempts before they were good enough to apply. Ie, the net contribution is clearly negative here.

Anyhow, I wonder how this will end, now it is clear that this person simply refuses to leave. Should people, like the ones running VGER, keep playing whack-a-mole with whatever aliases will be used in the future? Basically indefinitely. How is that reasonable?

> US criminal justice system

The message quoted above entered the net, apparently, through rogers.com. Given this person's writing style, my guess is that we're dealing with a French speaking Canadian.

QOTW2: Busted

Posted Apr 10, 2016 21:19 UTC (Sun) by roblucid (guest, #48964) [Link]

Doesn't messing with LKML justify special rendition?

QOTW2: Busted

Posted Apr 8, 2016 23:04 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link]

just another statistic in the over-representation of the mentally ill in the US criminal justice system.

US system? or Canadian? Since we're analyzing mail headers, Rogers Cable is Canadian, as is 99.213.x.y.

Still, it's quite a shame this continues for as long as it has. And also that he's resorted to hiding behind an alias (albeit in a technically-incompetent way).

QOTW2: Busted

Posted Apr 11, 2016 13:51 UTC (Mon) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link] (2 responses)

It's a bit sad that a patch like this gets posted on the LKML, and the response is

>Are you _certain_ this is correct? This construct usually appears when a function has a particular lock held, then needs to unlock it to call some other function. Are you _certain_ that this isn't the case?

And not, for example,

>This changeset is wrong, because the locking protocol specifies that hw->lock is unlocked (and IRQs re-enabled) inside csio_unreg_rnode().

(ideally there'd be an assert inside the latter to document the former, if possible.)

Y'all limp-wristed fools are making a buffet for the troll by leaving it up to them, seemingly in the name of being polite. That's not how technology works! There's an objective standard of right and wrong here: apply it, or suffer others' incompetence forevermore.

QOTW2: Busted

Posted Apr 12, 2016 16:03 UTC (Tue) by MrWim (subscriber, #47432) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't think it's in the name of being polite. Often when I'm reviewing code I'll come across something that's odd but is there for a reason due to some subtlety I've missed. I'll comment on it. Some times it will be a mistake by the programmer, sometimes it's there because the programmer went to a greater effort to understand the code and the interactions than I did.

For this reason as a reviewer it's better to ask then to come out all blustering.

QOTW2: Busted

Posted Apr 17, 2016 22:06 UTC (Sun) by jch (guest, #51929) [Link]

But phrasing the objection as a question can be misunderstood, especially when dealing with somebody with poor English. In such cases, I prefer to be extremely clear: "I may be wrong, but I think this is wrong".