I was a customer of their's last year before I moved. They were the only true broadband provider in the rural area I was living in. So moving to a "better" provider was practically impossible. Back then they were already running their service in fear of what their providers or the government would do to them (IMO). They were automatically blocking several ports (port 22 among others) because they are used for spam and hacking. I find it a shame really when ISPs are more afraid of their customers than they are afraid of threats from the outside.

Maybe the students figured they would get extra credit for going the extra step?

From their Terms and Conditions:

There's a lot they can potentially access beyond a simple transcript and course schedule. At least at my school, computer lab logins, library account, tuition and fees, financial aid, even purchasing a parking permit is all done through the same UN/PW pair.

No need to ... Weird Al already took care of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uQ_extNBDA&feature=related

I encountered a problem related to this recently. Back in Februrary I purchased tickets to see a special screening of Weird Al's movie "UHF". Between the time I purchased the tickets and the time I picked them up at WillCall, my bank had canceled the card I used and issued a due one due to a possible security breach. The conditions of being able to pick up my ticket was to have the credit card that I used for the purchase; that was no longer possible. (I also didn't realize there was this condition and failed to save the old CC to use as proof).

Thankfully the girl at WillCall didn't ask to see my CC and I got my tickets. But there are little things like this that could prove troublesome.

Would text messages be equivalent to e-mails? Government agencies are required to retain copies of all e-mails, IIRC. If texts are equivalent to e-mails then they would need to be saved. It may be easier for the phone provider to archive the texts than for the government agency to intercept them to archive them.

Damn... Grandma has really developed a potty mouth lately.

If you create a webmaster account with Google and register your site, Google will tell you how many people they send to you. They'll also give you a lot of other information like where in the list of search results was your website when it was clicked on.

A penny here and a penny there adds up to real money. Just ask the guy who who wrote the hack to transfer pennies from transactions to his bank account.

I realize that BP is not a US company... but is it "too big to fail"? What if the cleanup expenses are so great BP goes bankrupt. Will government agencies then provide them handouts?

Was it really a NASA balloon? What about the bodies witnesses claimed to see around the crash site? Those were just anthropomorphic dummies, eh? Video of the crash you say? Well, they have video of Apollo landing on the moon too and that didn't happen! *Wonders how long until someone says this in a non-joking manner*

Sounds a lot like "Stealthy IP Prefix Hijacking". Advertise a BGP route that will be accepted by some people to attract their traffic. Do it correctly, it may be less noticeable than a full prefix hijacking (though it was obviously noticed in this case). You can also attempt to moderate the amount of traffic you receive so that you don't DOS yourself with the incoming flow and you can analyze the traffic easier. BGP is a pretty insecure protocol and depends a lot upon the upstream providers filtering announcements properly.

What's worse is when student #2 makes no modifications to student #1's work.... including changing the name at the top of the code. Student #2 hand wrote their name at the top of the printout though.

"it is projected to increase internet traffic capacity between the two regions by over 20%, a wonderful boast to transpacific relations!"

That is until a ship drops anchor on top of it.