I came across this issue just now when searching for "ec2 pricing" - the featured snippet links to https://aws.amazon.com/emr/pricing/ instead of https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/, which looks close enough to the correct URL that I didn't notice it was the wrong page until I realised I couldn't find costs for i3 (which just came out). I'm surprised that no one at Google has fixed it yet; surely there are at least some Google engineers that use AWS for personal projects.
The number of possible letters is much, much smaller than the number of possible dictionary words. The latter would take many orders of magnitude longer to brute force, which would make it unfeasible.
Kenneth Cain, a former UN human rights lawyer, wrote a piece in a similar vein: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/apr/03/theobserver1 It was written over a decade ago but some of the points mentioned still feel very familiar today.
It's always encouraging to hear about schools like Stanford and Berkeley that are actually supportive of student-run initiatives like these. I just graduated from McGill University, and throughout most of my undergrad I was one of the admins of a website (wikinotes.ca) for sharing notes and other student-created course materials. We got little to no support from the administration, despite attempts at reaching out, and the only reason we knew that they heard about us was a mass email - filled with misinformation - sent out to profs warning them about us.
I know McGill's infamous for being especially bureaucratic, but it can't be impossible to get their support. Those who got their school's administration to support their project, what did you build and how did you do it?
Certainly that solution would have avoided this whole fiasco in the first place. Though immediate user feedback when entering an invalid email address is a somewhat useful feature as well, so maybe that's why the vendor included it.
