UK Man Convicted For Wi-Fi Piggybacking 659
CatrionaMcM tips us to a BBC story reporting that Gregory Straszkiewicz, a UK resident, was fined £500 and sentenced to a conditional discharge for 12 months after being caught using a laptop from a car parked outside somebody else's house. '[H]e was prosecuted under the Communications Act and found guilty of dishonestly obtaining an electronic communications service.' A separate BBC story notes that two other people in England were arrested and cautioned for sharing Wi-Fi uninvited.
Open AP? (Score:5, Interesting)
Crime to use open wifi? (Score:3, Interesting)
So accepting people's invitation to use their Wifi (by not securing it) is a crime...
It is the same as accusing someone of copyright infringement if they listen to their neighbor's CDs because their sound system is too loud...
PS: I still need to RTFA
NintendoDS (Score:3, Interesting)
Have a mobile data card handy . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
Witchcraft (Score:2, Interesting)
You should all note that the law these people have been accused of breaking is one designed to stop people stealing cable TV using hacked decoders. It was not designed for "theft" of Internet access. There is a defence to the accusation that the service was made public. However, in the recent cases the accused didn't get to make a defence, and probably never received legal advice anyway: they admitted "guilt" to the police, who are neither impartial nor independent, in order to have the case dropped.
But in New Salem (formerly known as Great Britain) anything that could possibly be construed as possibly putting possible children at possible risk by possible pedophiles is treated as a priori evidence of guilt of child abuse.
2005 story (Score:5, Interesting)
The second story (the new one) concerned two people who were cautioned for using people's wi-fi broadband internet connections without permission.
Re:Open Networks Are Open (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Crime to use open wifi? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Open AP? (Score:1, Interesting)
Can you sue for someone polluting your home with rogue radio waves?
*puts on tin foil thinking cap*
Re:Open AP? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I think is that 500 pounds and 12 months' probation is fucking ridiculous when you're not even causing any harm.
If he WAS causing actual harm, then I would limit his financial obligation to paying the victim for actual damages.
The fact that he was fined 500 pounds proves that this is about grabbing money from people, not keeping people from using open APs (which is impossible anyway.)
Re:Open AP? (Score:3, Interesting)
My WAP is open. It is intentionally so. My neighbours or anyone just generally passing by are free to share it. And people frequently do, according to my router's logs. It's not that I'm constantly needing those 6 MBit myself, so why would I mind anyone else using them. I see the fact that the network is unprotected as invitation enough for anyone to join in. I don't see myself posting ad banners around the street saying "Please share my WiFi" (and if I did, i might actually run out of bandwidth at some point).
Re:Open AP? (Score:2, Interesting)
My point again, nothing in the packets from it actually "invited" you in, as much as you want to believe it. It's just jargon that makes the procedure easier to understand. As I said to another poster further down, (completely with a typo) these are as much "invites" as HTTP cookies are nutritious.
This guy was behaving rather strangely.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Goodness only knows what he could possibly have being doing in there but I guess the local constabulary decided to charge him with a crime that they had evidence of.
So less a story about those brave wardrivers liberating the net from the bourgeoisie and more a story about someone wierdo having a wank.
If that's a slashdot word.
Re:Open AP? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Open AP? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Open AP? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's all about what a reasonable man might consider an invitation. It seems that the court decided a reasonable man would assume that the access point was left open accidentally. If the access point has a name that suggests it's open then you can reasoanbly assume it's there for public use.
You are allowed to use common sense when it comes to the law. This is why it's interpreted by humans and not robots.
Re:Open AP? (Score:3, Interesting)
Moreover you're drawing an arbitrary distinction between the DHCP on-wire protocol and English. What if the invitation was in Spanish, encoded in UTF-16. I at least couldn't read that in my packet capture, but presumably someone could. Would the invitation count then? You can argue about the intended meaning of the DHCP offer, but to argue that it can't really be an offer because it wasn't made in ASCII-encoded English is a bit silly.
Here's a situation I imagine to be analogous: There's a sign on a house that says "We have a pool" (SSID broadcast). Upon closer examination of the sign (DHCP request) you find instructions on how to access the pool (DHCP offer). I think you could make a reasonable argument either way about whether the pool was being advertised for public use. And I think a reasonable person, upon finding strangers in their pool, would simply kick them out and take down the sign and remove the ambiguity if they weren't intending to make that offer.
Re:Open AP? (Score:3, Interesting)
A more appropriate one might be--I am a wealthy man and like most wealthy men I have a driver. But all of our drivers are rather dim and they will accept orders from anybody.
So, I hire this guy, and because I'm wealthy and self-important I don't bother to instruct him that he's only supposed to drive me around, because I assume "I'm the one paying him, why should he take orders from anyone else?"
Then he goes missing for a week because you asked him to drive you to Alaska--knowing full well, unlike myself, how stupid the guy is. The whole way, you use my credit card to buy gas and stay at hotels.
Obviously I'm going to be irate once the bill arrives.
Where this analogy fails is that most people should not have to tell their drivers not to drive people to Alaska. How many people know they have to do anything to their wrouter to restrict access to it?
In a few years, yours may be a valid line of reasoning if we can assume that enough "new" users should know to secure their access point. Until then, I believe you've not got a leg to stand on.
Re:Open AP? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, as a matter of fact, encryption is THE way to tell if you're allowed to view satellite communications, at least here in the States. If a provider does not encrypt their signal, they have no(as in none, zero, zip, nada, nothing..) legal grounds to say that we can't watch their programming; however the moment they encrypt it, one can become liable for signal "theft" if they decrypt it without permission. The same needs to be applied to the Wifi arena. Laziness on the part of the "system administrator" should under no circumstances be grounds for the little twit to bring you up on criminal or civil charges.
Re:Open AP? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Open AP? (Score:3, Interesting)
No, you should not. Turning SSID broadcast off will not keep others from accidentally connecting to your AP if their own wireless network uses the same SSID. At the very least you would have to set a non-trivial (i.e. random) SSID and turn of SSID broadcasting to have a case against unauthorized access. I really don't understand why people are so adamantly avoiding encryption. The same people who go to court to defend their precious private bandwidth apparently don't care that their private data is broadcast to everybody in the neighborhood.
Re:Open AP? (Score:4, Interesting)
You argued that if I don't know how to control the behavior of the technology I bought, then I'm still at fault for the results. So if someone's client connects to my AP because they don't know how to modify its default behavior, why are they not at fault? I submit that this is a double standard.
Not neccassirly true (Score:3, Interesting)
Having said all that, I think you are probably incorrect on your assessment here. I suspect that a jury would come down on the side of it being obvious that you aren't supposed to stroll into the houses of others. Maybe if the door was open and you heard talking inside, you could claim you thought it might be an open party or something. But it'd be a dumb idea anyway because even if you won the criminal case, you'd probably lose the civil one that followed it. The "they have to tell you to leave" line I think is a little over used. It might apply to someone's unfenced lawn, but certainly not their actual house, and probably also not their electronic equipment.
Re:Open AP? (Score:3, Interesting)
How would you invite someone to share your wifi? Personally I'd broadcast an SSID and turn off encryption...
The prevalence of free wireless networks these days suggest that there's a whole lot of people who have no problem at all with sharing their wifi. Personally I'd have absolutely no problem with someone using my wifi. Are they, and am I, unreasonable? Is friendly neighbourly behaviour, letting someone deprived use something that costs me nothing extra, now considered unreasonable?
"You are allowed to use common sense when it comes to the law."
Apparently that was not used by the court in this case. Or it was populated by people who'd sue for costs after pissing on someone to put out a fire, and utterly unaware of the millions of charitable people around the earth.
Re:no it should not (Score:4, Interesting)
Per your interpretation, you have just engaged in criminal computer tresspass by using the slashdot web site. You requested permission to use the system (through your browser), that permission was granted by the system (through the web server). Since a piece of equipment cannot grant legal authority to someone, you had no authority to use the system.
There is no technical difference between the protocol exchange in the HTTP & the 801 series, both are automated request/response protocols which grant authorization.