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Stealing Laptops For Class Credit

Posted by timothy on from the for-bonus-points-assassinate-the-prof dept.

First time accepted submitter core_tripper writes "Students at the University of Twente have stolen thirty laptops from various members of the university's staff. They were not prosecuted for this, so they could just get on with their studies. Indeed, these students even received ECTS credits for these thefts. UT researcher Trajce Dimkov asked the students to steal the machines as part of a scientific experiment. Stealing these laptops turned out to be a pretty simple matter."

5 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Re:"Human behavior" by arth1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It doesn't mention whether the cleaners or caretakers knew the people they were letting in or not.

    Does it matter? A lot of thefts are inside jobs.

  2. Security without security? by Dahamma · · Score: 1, Insightful

    "The university’s security staff were informed in advance, to make sure that the students involved did not end up in jail."

    Physical security is a lot harder to enforce when you tell the physical security not to do their job...

    1. Re:Security without security? by RyuuzakiTetsuya · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They were testing whether or not the staff followed good practices with physical security.

      --
      Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
    2. Re:Security without security? by KevMar · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think its just the opposite. They didn't tell them to let the students steal the laptops, they let them know in advance that if they catch someone taking the laptop that it may be legit. Just by mentioning this would have made it harder because laptop theft would be on the security teams mind making it easier to spot.

      --
      Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
  3. trust by Walt+Dismal · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Seems like a douche move rather than a fair one. A university is a place of somewhat more trust in others than the outside, because in academia you share knowledge with others, the spirit is a bit different, you don't take others' tools.

    Taking advantage of that to run a test of whether it's easy to steal laptops is not entirely ethical.

    Not to say that people shouldn't be careful, but exploiting them isn't cool either.

    When I was in school, someone hacked my student account and framed me for downloading and piracy. I didn't have to go to court, but if I ever found out who did it, I'd gladly have caused them serious injury.