Have you heard about the guy who’s going to be arrested for installing a Distributed.net client on computers at DeKalb University? I’ve been waiting to post a link on this until I came across a real article about it. There’s really nothing to say about this other than it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. The fact that they’re accusing him of stealing about half a million dollars worth of bandwidth is obviously ridiculous. They’re charging him 59 cents a minute for bandwidth, but even that inflated figure doesn’t explain the charge, since Distributed.net clients only connect long enough to send up finished work and get new work units. Probably the closest parallel to this case is when Craig Neidorf was arrested for stealing an E911 document that Bell South claimed was worth $80,000. As it turned out, you could obtain the document for a trivial charge by calling an 800 number and asking for it.