Tangotiger Blog

Wow. The article does’t say, but what if the student had alerted somebody first that he would try to check on the fix? Might that have averted the entire problem?

Expulsion seems way over the line here, and I naively have to wonder whether his name and/or ethnicity might have played some part. Would a bureaucrat want to have it come out that (s)he let some guy with an Arabic sounding name off with a slap on the wrist?

That is the sort of thing that I might be close to doing myself; if I’ve found and reported a bug somewhere, I’d probably want to see if it later got fixed. But I probably also wouldn’t try to access something without getting permission first…

I don’t think the Arabic thing carries much weight in Montreal.

But, I love the part that the company’s software that he was exposing is the company that offered him a job!  Really, this worked out fantastic for him.

Good point - I would hope Canadians are less scared of Arabic names than Americans are.

It is amusing that the company whose software he’d hacked offered him a job, and I do hope it works out well for him. But that may or may not fully compensate for getting expelled from university.

In Quebec, in between 11 years of K-11 and 3 years of college is something called CEGEP (basically, a transition school that takes grade 12 and year 1 of university).  That’s what he was expelled from.