Wardrive

Part of speech: verb, noun

Definitions

1. Travelling by car while using a laptop or phone to locate and log open or unsecured Wi-Fi networks along the route
2. Driving through streets with a receiver that picks up signals from nearby wireless access points and records their locations
3. Touring an area by vehicle to map and record the wireless internet networks that can be detected from the road

Etymology: Wardriving is a compound of "war" and "drive", and the name was built deliberately on the older term "wardialing", which described hunting for modem lines by automatically dialing a long run of phone numbers. Wardriving swapped the telephone for a laptop and a wireless card: the searcher drives through a city, usually in a car, logging the wireless networks that can be picked up along the way. The first half of the word borrows "war" from the older practice, so the sense of conquest is inherited from wardialing rather than from any military meaning of the wireless activity itself. The second half is the plain verb "drive", describing the mode of travel. Together they name an activity in which the searcher moves through a place collecting data about its networks.