Re:You missed my point (Score 1)

The fact remains that he is forcing students to commit digital reconnaissance of unwitting networks. Regardless of the amount of disclaimers he puts into the syllabus, the students are still breaking the law. The last college I was at, we ended up with a lab machine that got infected with something (not sure what it was infected with, because the FBI confiscated the machine). It ended up pounding a remote server. The company that owned the server contacted the FBI who traced it back to us. While we never got explicitly in trouble, the possibility is there. I would think that the university IT staff would be much more concerned, since it's their network that is being used as the base for these probes. Someone, somewhere, is going to catch on to this, and call the authorities. Even if the prof says don't break in, even if these are white-hats, even if it's for learning and academic purposes, it's still WRONG. The wrongness of this plan is demonstrated by the university's stance that they will report anyone who scans university systems to the Dean of Corrections. If I were a student, I'd be concerned by that fact alone. I can't do it to my own school, but prof says it's ok to do to someone else's machine, who is completely unaware? Yeah........