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

[Prescott Oelke]

Kevin Brown wrote:

> 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.
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For the record the guy that was arrested in this case was charged with 
attempting (and succeeding, from the sounds of it) to hack the network 
that he was leeching off of. In other words, despite Yahoo's headline, 
he was not arrested for "stealing wi-fi", he was arrested for hacking 
(or cracking if that's more your speed). I guess "Man charged with 
hacking" just doesn't turn heads the way it used to.