Interesting story, and a lot more similar stories shared by commenters at Hacker News.
What an awful thing to happen. This young man points out a flaw to do a favor to the school and the company who makes the software, and instead of fixing it, they hold the school accountable and this kid gets the boot? And not just booted, but his academic career obliterated without appeal.
I can understand that the board who voted to expel him heard that he had hacked into their systems and was caught before doing anything with it. And to any of us, that would be a reasonable thing to expel for in and of itself. But the awful thing is that they didn't even give the guy a chance to speak. I would bet that if he had the opportunity to explain his situation, the CS department would have definitely not been 14/15 in favor. This is what happens when justice is suspended for bureaucracy - his voice got crushed because the company demanded it. If I were in engineering hiring, I'd put an offer out to him because he obviously knows what he's doing, and is trying to do good with his abilities.
Between cases like this and the man who was charged with promoting illicit gambling in the US for writing software for foreign countries we've made the work of programming a minefield, where it's just safer to not touch anything, not break anything, and don't be too creative, or else you might face legal repercussions for daring to step on anyone's toes with your ideas. What kind of message is that? I'm really mad that this school decided to teach a lesson to this guy, and every other student and programmer, that going outside the defined box of your work is an offense punishable with expulsion.
There's another really good lesson to be learned here, too. Get a lawyer. When some asshole at a company or in the police or government threatens you with legal action, especially for something you're pretty sure is the right thing to do, you need to hire a defense. Men with power know that most people are timid and don't know their rights. Its up to us to hold them to account. Unfortunately, the best way to do that is to hire a lawyer and never agree to signing or admitting to anything without your counsel's approval. Skytech sounds like a bully organization who just wanted to make sure that their embarrassing fuckup was seen as "being under attack" rather than just piece-of-shit coding that could have led to countless identity thefts.
Corporations should be afraid of the government, and the government should be afraid of its citizens. The situation, it seems, is presently upside down.