Lab Notes

A man in Tampa Bay was arrested for Wi-Fi theft. Not the theft of Wi-Fi equipment — the theft of Wi-Fi bandwidth. He was sitting in a car with a laptop outside the house of a user with an open network, and was arrested under a law that makes unauthorized access to a computer network a crime.

From the sounds of the original article, the man wasn't arrested because of the network break-in, but rather because the homeowner was concerned about a possible prowler. After seeing the man "hunched over his computer" outside his home late at night, the homeowner called police. The police didn't care for the man hanging around either, so the arrest was made. At least, that's my theory — the charge was a pretense to roust a creep.