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

[Kevin Brown]

Jason Spatafore wrote:
> On Wednesday 13 July 2005 14:39, Ted Gould wrote:
> 
>>If you use my Wifi, there is no additional cost to me.  If you take my
>>car, I would have to buy another.  This is the same as software
>>requiring no cost to replicate versus hardware which does.
> 
> 
> If I used your WiFi to spam up 3,000,000 people a day, and you had to pay the 
> fines for me doing such, your attitude regarding such a situation would 
> change very rapidly. 

According to the FCC, the airwaves are in the public domain.  As such 
they can't trespass on others property and so can be intercepted by 
anyone with a receiver for that frequency (with a few exceptions such as 
cell phones).  This means that I have every right to listen to your 
traffic, but not to decrypt it.

I'm not certain about talking with a device, but since most systems with 
wireless cards (which would be Windows boxes) automatically connect to 
any AP that will let them on, I find it ridiculous that this is a crime. 
  If the person had at least attempted to secure it (disable broadcast 
of SSID, add WEP or WPA), then connecting and using the resources it 
lets you openly access should not, in and of itself, be a crime.

However, if I use your open connection to send millions of spam or 
infect other systems with worms/virii, then you are guilty of providing 
me the link even though I'm guilty of the rest.  This, in essence, makes 
you an accessory or an accomplice to the crime in question.