May 23, 2007 by Brad.

A Michigan man is being prosecuted for using a cafe’s free WiFi… from his car. Sam Peterson was arrested under a Michigan law barring access to anyone else’s network without authorization, according to Michigan TV station WOOD. Since the cafe’s WiFi network was reserved for customers, and Peterson never came into the cafe, he was essentially piggybacking off of the open network without authorization.

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The arrest came about because Peterson apparently showed up to the Union Street Cafe to use its free WiFi from the comfort of his car, and he did so every single day. A police officer grew suspicious of Peterson and eventually questioned him as to what he was up to. Peterson, not realizing that what he was doing was (at least) ethically questionable, told the officer exactly what he was doing. “I knew that the Union Street had WiFi. I just went down and checked my e-mail and didn’t see a problem with that,” Peterson told a reporter.

Under Michigan’s “Fraudulent access to computers, computer systems, and computer networks” law, Peterson’s actions could result in a five-year felony and a $10,000 fine. However, prosecutors do not plan to throw the book at him, as they don’t believe that Peterson was aware he was even breaking the law. Instead, he will pay a $400 fine and do 40 hours of community service, and the arrest will not go on his record.

Coincidentally, the cafe owner that Peterson was leeching WiFi off of didn’t even realize that what Peterson was doing was a crime at the time. Neither did the police officer. “I had a feeling a law was being broken, but I didn’t know exactly what,” Sparta police chief Andrew Milanowski told the TV station.

This is not the first time someone has been arrested for piggybacking on a WiFi connection. In 2005, a Florida man was arrested and hit with a third-degree felony for surfing an open WiFi network from his SUV. Similarly, an Illinois man was arrested in 2006 for, again, using an unsecured WiFi network from his car. He pleaded guilty to the charges and was given one year’s court supervision and a $250 fine. A Washington man was also arrested in 2006 for parking outside of a coffee shop and using the open WiFi connection without purchasing anything. And just earlier this year, an Alaska man was arrested for using the WiFi network from the public library after hours to play games from—you guessed it—his car in the parking lot.

Whether or not you agree with the legality of using an open WiFi network without the owner’s authorization, one thing is painfully clear: if you’re going to leech, try not to do it from a parked car right in front of the building.

read more:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070522-michigan-man-arrested-for-using-cafes-free-wifi-from-his-car.html

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May 21, 2007 by Brad.

A 92mm Vantec Tornado fan that pumps out 119 CFM pushes a 8800GTX card well beyond what most watercooling setups are capable of in terms of temperatures and overclocking.

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May 21, 2007 by Brad.

The terabyte era arrives, with Hitachi’s 5-platter, 10-head 7K1000 hard drive. ExtremeTech puts Hitachi’s latest hard drive on the bench and let you know how it performs.

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May 21, 2007 by Brad.

It looks like the long-awaited upgrade to LED-based displays will be landing shortly. The HP Compaq 2510p 12.1-inch laptop and 2710p tablet PC will reportedly be the first two on the list to receive such treatment. The firm’s duo of LED-packin’ machines are scheduled to ship out in Q3 of this year.

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May 16, 2007 by Brad.

Samsung seems to have found room to do a little boasting of its own, trotting out its first 4GB DDR2 DIMM RAM.

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May 16, 2007 by Brad.

Since then, IBM scientists have continued to drive performance improvements to continue the path of Moore
’s Law. Ten of IBM’s biggest chip breakthroughs chosen from the dozens of innovations coming from IBM’s labs in the past ten years include

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May 16, 2007 by Brad.

These pictures were taken only a few minutes ago. AMD showed off their Barcelona quad-core processors in action today in Monterrey, California. What you see in the pictures below are single processor and dual processor configurations, so a true “4×4″ is now realized by AMD that looks very comfortable on an enthusiast desktop.

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May 16, 2007 by Brad.

Hitachi has revealed a 1 Terrabyte Blu-ray recorder at the Harvey Norman retail conference being held at the Melbourne Convention Centre.

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May 16, 2007 by Brad.

An experimental breakthrough that could dramatically increase the capacity, speed and reliability of computer hard drives has been announced by an international team of physicists.

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May 16, 2007 by Brad.

ATI’s DirectX 10 capable GPU is finally here in the form of the Radeon HD 2900 XT. Does this $399 video card have what it takes to compete with NVIDIA
’s 8800 series? We explore the architecture, image quality, and real world gaming that shows a different experience than canned benchmarks.

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