CNN.com – Man charged with stealing Wi-Fi signal – Jul 7, 2005 — How can this be illegal when the computers often latch onto the wrong signal by themselves? This is going to create a lot of trouble for the justice system if they prosecute! My PC Magazine column here discusses the ramifications. The fact is that it should be public policy that an open unencrypted 802.11 signal be public domain once it leaves the premises.
ST. PETERSBURG, Florida (AP) — Police have arrested a man for using someone else’s wireless Internet network in one of the first criminal cases involving this fairly common practice.
Benjamin Smith III, 41, faces a pretrial hearing this month following his April arrest on charges of unauthorized access to a computer network, a third-degree felony.
Police say Smith admitted using the Wi-Fi signal from the home of Richard Dinon, who had noticed Smith sitting in an SUV outside Dinon’s house using a laptop computer.
found by C. Groves
Stealing? Hardly. If they sniffed the airwaves they would have seen that the owners router issued a DHCPOFFER, as in OFFER. He offered his service whomever REQUESTED it. If I request to use your water spigot and you have a robot that says yes, I guess you gave permission. His router gave permission by offering the DHCP IP. If he didn’t want people using his router, he should have turned off DHCP. Pretty simple stuff.
This should die soon in court. The owner was lazy, or ignorant, but willingly gave the service.
I agree with the aspect of using a connection if the owner does nothing to protect it. Even the smallest security measure. This though I think is different because he was in a residential neighborhood at night. When someone was checking him out he left. Then he returned later!? I would call this suspicious behavior. A more open public area, Library, Panera, Bruggers, would not find this odd. But in a residential area!! There might have been something else involved here.
I thought that when someone doesn’t lock their wifi, that they are saying, “I’m sharing with whoever wants to use it”. I’m not kidding, I really believed this until I read today that it is illegal. But this was based on my assumption that everyone has unlimited traffic. I didn’t even know that there was such a thing nowadays as limited traffic except outside America. Another reason I assume they are intentionally sharing is because of what local governments and cafes are doing with their freebee wifi nodes. Our apartment complex has an open wifi and I’m sure they don’t care who connects. I’m too far away from the node though, so I just connect to whoever is ‘sharing’.