[quote author=“japaneseimportscomau”]Could i throw in here that anyone foolish enough to just plug and play their wireless router (like my ‘default’ neighbour) is probably not savvy enough to even know that anyone is pilfering their wireless… 8)

Yes that also is a factor. It makes you wonder if eventually routers will be sold with encryption as the default setting, but then those not so savvy may not figure out how to get it working. Perhaps someday ISPs will require encryption as part of the user agreement.

More and more businesses have open access points to attract customers. I could see places like Starbucks dropping the charge to keep up with other coffee shops as free wifi becomes more common.

[quote author=“Low Bat”]It makes you wonder if eventually routers will be sold with encryption as the default setting, but then those not so savvy may not figure out how to get it working. Perhaps someday ISPs will require encryption as part of the user agreement.

Would be nice, but most people aren’t tech savvy enough. Just search on this forum for people who’ve had problems. Wi-fi vendors don’t help matters. Try having a n00b set up WPA, where you don’t need to know about long strings of hex characters. “Do I use ‘WPA’ or ‘WPA-PSK’?” “Is the data encryption ‘WEP’ or’TKIP’? Isn’t it ‘WPA’???” Even then there are still lots of gotchas. I had to change the WPA-PSK passphrase on my router from 25 to 13 characters because most of my devices were flaky with the longer passphrase.

Add that to the fact that most people just don’t have the patience to get this stuff to work and just return things to the store - or toss them. That’s why Sony puts those big blue “Don’t return this to the store” stickers inside their product boxes.

Drachen and Low Bat,

I actually agree w/ you guys on the whole point that is now up for discussion…proving the ‘willfully’ part…that’s where the challenge lays IMO, not necessarily whether or not there is something on the books…so yea, from that standpoint, making it ‘stick’ is the legal challenge that a cable company or gov is up against.

Still…‘willfully’ might be harder to determine in a city where you have 20 AP available…but in my neighborhood, I have 5-6 available, and DSL isn’t available in my part of town, it’s cable only, and there is no way no how that any of them are public access points, they are all in private homes…there isn’t a major road, hotel, business w/in 5 miles of my home…hills everywhere…so if somebody were to somehow get caught on an AP here, it’s most certainly be either ‘willfull’ or ‘supidity’ that drove the connection…hehehe…

I just got thru getting my dad and my brother BOTH off of a neighbor’s AP…in both cases, they had not setup their client stuff correctly and windows was set to ‘connect to first available’...so in their cases it wasn’t ‘willful’, instead it was just not knowing what they were doing…

But, in the end, I’m not sure that would necessarily get you off…saying that you didn’t know…but, in the end, is a cable company or gov really gonna prosecute someone who just did some news reading and ebay shoppint accidentally over a neighbor’s wifi, probably not…it’s gonna be the child porn guy, or some other illegal activity that pushes this into court.

Chris

Nice little article:

We have covered this type of story before: a man finds an open wireless access point, parks in front of the home or business containing the WAP, surfs away on his laptop, and the police are called. The story has played itself out once again, this time in Vancouver, WA, where 20-year-old Alexander Eric Smith was arrested after a three-month stretch where he periodically parked in front of a coffee shop off-and-on with a laptop and used its WAP.

The kicker? He never bought so much as a small latte.

Brewed Awakenings manager Emily Pranger finally tired of his presence and called 911. Police came and told Smith to surf elsewhere. After returning, he was taken into custody and charged with theft of services.

Note that unlike other cases, he was not charged with unauthorized use of a computer network. Instead, the premise for his arrest is that he used Brewed Awakenings’ free WiFi network without buying anything from them.

Open WAPs are tempting in certain situations. When camping, I’ve driven into town in search of an open WAP to check e-mail or get my Lounge fix. However, law enforcement types seem to be paying more attention to WiFi leeching these days. An Illinois man was fined US$250 earlier this year after pleading guilty to remotely accessing another computer system without the owner’s approval. That followed the conviction of a Florida man for felony unauthorized access to computer network in 2005.

Fears over what people might be doing over wireless networks appear to be driving the concern over wardriving. It turns out that Smith is a convicted sex offender. It therefore follows that he was using the coffee shop’s WiFi to look a porn or something equally nefarious </sarcasm>.

What I find fascinating is that when newspapers and TV stations report on occurrences such as this, they generally magnify the scope of the problem and put an alarmist spin on it.

On a random neighborhood street in Vancouver, a KATU News laptop detected 11 networks, five of which were unsecured, meaning anyone could log on to them for free.

A computer expert told KATU News there is no way to know if someone is using your wireless connection without permission.

Actually, there is. In addition, it is so trivial to turn on security for a home (or business) WAP, that there is no reason anyone should leave a WiFi network unprotected unless he or she really wants it to be open to all comers. Perhaps the sensationalized reporting that usually follows cases like this arises out of the fact that most people (media included) don’t really understand how computers in general—and wireless networking in particular—work. Until people are better educated, those tempted by open access points are better off carefully considering whether or not to open up the laptop and start surfing.

Erik

Without wanting to reopen this:

I can think of one reason you’d leave it unsecured. And it’s me for the moment.

I use an Airport express at home for the wireless network hooked up to an old iMac as the server. I had it setup to use a WEP key. On my powerbook I could simply connect, enter my password which was crunched into the wep key, once, and then connect at will.

On the PC’s I had to actually manually enter the whopping great series of letters and numbers to access the WiFi. At least I only had to do it once, right? No. Because unfortunately it’s not a perfect world. Sometimes we get blackouts or power spikes and the Airport Express needs a hard reset. Which wipes the WEP key and puts it back to unsecured as a default. So after the third time of this happening last week I really couldn’t be bothered going through the drama of resetting it all so I just left it unsecured. Now we log on, my Father in law came over and logged on, no hassles with keys etc. And since anyone else - wardrivers etc, can’t access any of our files but can simply leech the broadband, well good luck to them. It’s just not worth the hassle anymore to me.

(address withheld from publication so everyone doesn’t come to my street )

That’s why they have the keyphrase that sets up the WEP key.

Erik

[quote author=“tifosiv122”]That’s why they have the keyphrase that sets up the WEP key.

Erik

might be windows specific as it doesn’t seem to work with my PC’s on the Apple Airport :?:

So many cities are setting up free wifi networks these days, San Francisco and the peninsula for example, that it seems ridiculous that anyone would be prosecuted for surfing an unsecure connection in a public place.