'I'm innocent!' says IT contractor on trial after Office 365 bill row spiraled out of control An IT contractor is facing criminal charges after turning off the Microsoft Office 365 service of a customer he said owed him money. Jim Kubicek, 48, of Cumming, Georgia, US, was arrested and charged with theft by extortion, computer theft, and computer trespass. He denies any wrongdoing, and told The Register: "I am innocent …
Cumming-Forsyth County Chamber of Commerce.
Not government in the context of legitimate legislators.
But CoC's tend to *think* they're government. (sorry, personal experience speaking)
I've seen several write ups of this. Interestingly SocMedia colour him as innocent, and one or two media presentations paint him as some sort of cowboy lone wolf technical terrorist. Interesting dichotomy.
Considering (as I understand it) he actually employs a few bodies, I hope he comes out on top.
Whether you are innocent of a charge is entirely irrelevant to the matter of whether it's false arrest of not. What matters is whether the arresting authorities have reasonable grounds for making an arrest in the first place. Many people are arrested, go to court and are found not guilty. Very few succeed in winning false (or unlawful) arrest cases.
However, this one does sound odd. I'm pretty sure there's a lot more to tell on this case.
"While at a careers fair at Lanier Technical College, the IT contractor was pulled aside by officers from the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office, cuffed, and taken to the county jail."
He probably didn't make a very good impression with pospective employers. Or maybe not - "Hey, we can probably get that guy who was arrested pretty cheap!"
Yes, but not as you thought of.
Consider that he might have had a booth there and was interviewing people for employment in his local business.
Now would the attendees of said careers fair want to be employed in an IT career anywhere near that locality? Really really great when the local Chamber of Commerce torpedoes future local commerce. *That* is the aspect that should be blown up in local newspapers!
Are people just stupid?
Why pay for the M$ shit when you can get it for free?
Or at least this is my view. There is a perfectly good alternative that has been around for years. And it's free. Why in the name of God would you want to give ANY money to these shysters? Is Office 365 THAT GOOD that you must have it?
The office of County Sheriff in the US is the -only-, I repeat ONLY, elected law enforcement officer in the world. In the WORLD. It is an archaic and unnecessary agency. It is a highly politicized office and is populated with hacks, morons, corrupt incompetents, and criminals in their own right. Deputies and other employees are very often hired based on the "good-old-boy" methodology. The office of County Sheriff is an overlapping, redundant, and highly expensive agency and should be eliminated. Everything about a County Sheriff's Department is questionable, from it's hiring practices, to it's access to highly sensitive citizen data bases. It is a terrible situation in America, rife with abuse.
In this case, some kind of good-old-boy connection between the CoC and the Sheriff's office, perhaps a well placed political campaign contribution, may explain why this poor, stiffed, contractor finds himself in jail right now. Just sayin'...
<quote>t is a highly politicized office and is populated with hacks, morons, corrupt incompetents, media whores1, and criminals in their own right.</quote>
There!!!, FTFY
1 Edited to include such types as Joe Arpaio (formerly sheriff of Maricopa County Arizona), and a more closer to home one, (Grady Judd of Polk County Florida who just loves to tout his department's successes on local TV).
I think this has been said... but I suppose it depends. I think this has been said, but if the service was paid through him, and they were delinquint, I think he was within his rights (although, see below, I would avoid this kind of situation entirely...). If it was not paid through him, he's in the wrong; users of any cloud service really must consider what happens if they lose access to that service (and it sounds like they did consider that at least to some extent since they say they lost no data.) If The gov't (including local gov'ts like this) do have a nasty habit of using criminal charges in cases where anyone else would use a civil suit.
When I was doing contract IT work with a few business partners, we made quite sure that a) Subscription services ("cloud" backup, dynamic dns, e-mail and web hosting) were paid by the client directly to whoever provided the service. We were paid for our services, not to pass some money onto a 3rd party. b) They had copies of all notes we made*; whether they knew how to use it or not, a future IT vendor would find them useful. In other words, we followed the general principal "if the whole IT group got hit by a bus, the customer should not be screwed."
*Notes we gave them included changes we made from stock config on routers, access points, etc.; network maps; device documentation for some devices (for instance one site had a PBX where they had the "end user" manual so it just said to call a PBX vendor for changing half the stuff; we found the real manual with all the info and gave them a copy); administrative credentials (for computers, online services, routers, access points, and whatever else); and miscellaneous notes (for instance, noting one high-end HP network printer they had that dropped off the network several times a week and had to be power cycled, HP never released non-buggy firmware for the darned thing.)
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