An update on the UMN affair

Bloody hell... What is the relevance of malicious intent, other than improving the odds of acceptance by the conference where they planned to present that... research?

You seem to imply that being a part of malicious plan to introduce a security hole imparts some recognizable features to the patches, making them easier to catch than "innocent" buggy ones. Mind elaborating on that and showing some kind of evidence?

Research into the features that correlate with looser review would be very valuable, exactly because it would allow to improve the rejection rate for crap. But that would take real experiment design - valid statistics, decently-sized datasets, etc.