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Student Expelled From Montreal College For Finding "Sloppy Coding"
innocent_white_lamb writes "In what appears to be a more-and-more common occurrence, Ahmed Al-Khabez has been expelled from Dawson College in Montreal after he discovered a flaw in the software that the college (and apparently all other colleges across Quebec) uses to track student information. His original intention was to write a mobile app to allow students to access their college account more easily, but during the development of his app he discovered 'sloppy coding' that would allow anyone to access all of the information that the system contains about any student. He was initially ordered to sign a non-disclosure agreement stating that he would never talk about the flaw that he discovered, and he was expelled from the college shortly afterward."
"He told me that I could go to jail for six to twelve months for what I had just done and if I didnâ(TM)t agree to meet with him and sign a non-disclosure agreement he was going to call the RCMP and have me arrested. So I signed the agreement."
You're an idiot. You signed something under threat of prison / arrest without bothering to consult a lawyer. No amount of mention of poverty, trust, or even just plain intimidation should have made you do such a thing without first consulting a lawyer.
And, as such, your legal position is not significantly weakened because, by talking to the media, you've BREACHED that non-disclosure agreement that you voluntarily signed and would now have to prove duress in a court to invalidate that.
You're an idiot. Don't sign anything, and if you do abide by what you sign. If they threaten you with police if you DON'T sign anything, pick up the phone and call the police (or lawyer) yourself. Duress to sign a contract is extremely important. Signing an NDA (of all things) "voluntarily" and then claiming it was done under duress in a public statement (that mentions the NDA you've just agreed you won't mention) is idiotic. Call a lawyer: it's the ONLY sensible option at that point.
And if you'd done that? Sure, it would have cost you a few hundred to get them in, but there's no way on earth that you'd be where you are now (i.e. having to hire lawyers to get back into school, for instance). In fact, likely the matter would all quickly become a "misunderstanding" that was hastily swept up out of the press.
You're an idiot. All you've done is shown a court that what you did was so grey-area that you'd rather hastily sign a contract than have the police look into it, and then you've gone and broken that exact contract, and admitted doing just that in the most public way possible.
All of the other students in the CS department should drop all their CS classes and change their major. Put the 14 idiot professors out of work and kill the whole department - then maybe, just maybe, this sort of authoritarian bullshit has a chance off stopping. The norm is on its way to becoming: You graduated from college? Sorry, we're looking for someone who can think independently."