OT: Man Charged With Stealing Wi-Fi Signal - Yahoo! News

[Judd Pickell]

The biggest problem with WiFi is that it counts a projection of your
personal/private space on others. If you were to take your fence and
stretch it out until it covered the same area accessible by your WiFi,
and everyone else did as well, there would be a big overlap. So now
you could be standing in your yard playing ball with your son while
also being in someone elses yard. Which then leaves the question, are
you invading their privacy, or are they invading yours?

WiFi requires a connection, which can be best translated as putting a
gate on the above fence, which means you have to conciously go through
the gate knowing you are entering their, for lack of a better term,
domain. So who is right and who is wrong? If we had a physical
representation of our WiFi reach, the discussion would be mote. If you
are in their space, you are violating a law somewhere. However, then
you would also realize that your area overlaps someone elses, what
then? And how far can we project our private space on public areas? Do
we have power over the sidewalk? What if we built a fence throught he
sidewalk to prevent people getting to close to the house, would we be
violating a law?

Too many questions, and not enough answers. Everyone is too busy
arguing the details and not looking at the bigger issues (ie congress
and governments is what I am talking about here as everyone). I would
hate to think that someday I could be charged with what this man did,
if in my home I am also using wireless, and one of my connections
accidently connects to a neighbors becuase it was insecure, while mine
required passwords (with the device going to the easiest to access
connection first). Nothing in the article has mentioned what would
have happened if the guy had been inside the neighbors house
connecting to the guys WiFi.. oh well..

Just my .02.

Sincerely,
Judd Pickell


On 7/13/05, Ted Gould <ted at gould.cx> wrote:
> Badger, Shawn wrote:
> > If you put your phone out on the curb without a lock on it which is what
> > basically what people are doing by leaving their WAPs open!
> 
> Sorry to bring up this topic again, but if you disabled long distance
> and 411 calling on your phone -- would you care?
> 
> I guess I get tired of the phrase "people who have open WAPs are lazy or
> stupid".  I have a WAP, it is open.  I know how to configure it.  I
> choose to leave it open.  I haven't had any issues.
> 
>                 --Ted
> 
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