This is unconscionable, arbitrary, and rebarbative
They charged a guy with a FELONY for piggybacking off of a coffee shop's wireless internet signal.
"It wasn't anything we were looking for, and it wasn't anything that we frankly particularly wanted to get involved in, but it basically fell in our lap and it was a little hard to just look the other way when somebody handed it to us," said Lynn Hopkins, assistant prosecuting attorney for Kent County [Michigan].There's taxpayer money at work, going to give a criminal record to a man who did nothing wrong. That's one of the more asinine charging decisions I've ever seen made in my life and it ought to come back and bite the DA in the rear come election time.Under the statute, individuals who log on to a Wi-Fi network with the owner's permission, or who see a pop-up screen that says it's a public network, can assume they're authorized to use the network, Hopkins said.
Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley...