C’mon and Take a Free Ride

Didja hear about the guy in Florida who got arrested for using someone else’s wireless network?

Police have arrested a man for using someone else’s wireless Internet network in one of the first criminal cases involving this fairly common practice.

Benjamin Smith III, 41, faces a pretrial hearing this month following his April arrest on charges of unauthorized access to a computer network, a third-degree felony.

Police say Smith admitted using the Wi-Fi signal from the home of Richard Dinon, who had noticed Smith sitting in an SUV outside Dinon’s house using a laptop computer.

Or the guy in Britain who was fined for hijacking a wireless broadband connection.

A UK man has been fined £500 and sentenced to 12 months’ conditional discharge for hijacking a wireless broadband connection.

On Wednesday, a jury at Islewoth court in London found Gregory Straszkiewicz, 24, guilty of dishonestly obtaining an electronic communications service and possessing equipment for fraudulent use of a communications service.

Straszkiewicz was prosecuted under sections 125 and 126 of the Communications Act 2003.

Well, there’s a question that’s sorta unanswered in both stories. Why weren’t the wireless broadband connections secured? To be honest, I don’t think much about wireless network security. Once, while enjoying the wireless access at a local Starbucks, a woman came up to me and asked if it was a secure wireless connection, and nattered on about how she’d secured her Verizon wireless network at her office, while I stared blankly and waited to get back to my frappucino. I’ve piggybacked on unsecured wireless connections and my own wireless network at home isn’t secured with password access or anything.

To be honest, I’m not even sure I know how to secure my wireless network. Chances are there’s probably somebody freeloading off of it right now. (Though since my neighbors have unsecured wireless networks of their own, hitch-hikers have their pick.) And I’m not sure I’m all that worried about unless it becomes a real resource suck.

I tend to think of it as an extension of the “loose change” theory — if you give someone extra change when they need it, then someone will give it back to you when you need it. I think there’s a traffic version of that — if you let someone into a lane when they need it, someone will let you into a lane when you need it. I’ve used my share of “loose wireless” so if someone borrows it from time to time.

Besides, I tend to agree with Joris Evers on this one.

If you don’t secure your wireless network, I don’t think it should be a crime if somebody else uses it.

I mean, it’s kinda link leaving your front door open all day and then complaining when someone walks in off the street. Sure, sure. It’s your place, and maybe they don’t have a right to be there. But you did leave the door open, didn’t ya?