I could see something like this being pulled off by a morally grey group like Anonymous or something, or even an APT, and I get the feeling that the community wouldn’t have been half as offended if either of those were the case.
But serious academics doing this using their real names?! It’s a little amazing that any of this got approved both from a legal and an ethical perspective, and the consequences are completely unsurprising. To quote Jurassic Park, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
If a car manufacturer intentionally made a few cars with malfunctioning breaks just to test whether the authorities would catch them, then it’s reasonable for people, who are currently relying on such a car, to get upset about that.
