Stealing WIFI!

[fuji]

All very interesting, but I suspect the key word is 'fraudulently' in the first paragraph. An open network is no different than an open road or an open door.

Well two answers:

1. If you legitimately believed the public had been invited to use it, if you made an honest mistake, believing it was the coffee shop's wifi or some such, then you don't have a guilty mind, and so no crime, but

2. If you know you're not supposed to use it (no colour of right), you know it's someone's private connection that has been inadvertently left open, and you use it, then yes it's criminal

I agree they're only likely to be interested in pressing the charge when it is connected to other more serious crimes, such as in the example you quoted. The charge is also brought against people who steal cable TV service by reconnecting wires that Rogers had disconnected. Otherwise it's like leaving your wallet on a park bench and going for a stroll. You're an idiot for not protecting your property--but if someone takes it, it's still theft. Like the wallet situation, probably not a high priority for the police to investigate either--they'll likely just tell the victim to be more careful and move on to more important crimes.

Still, the question in post #19 was is it legal to use someone else's internet connection without their permission, and the answer is that it is illegal.

 

[oldjones]

When you fire up your computer's wi-fi and it finds an open connection, there's no way for you to know why it's open. It may be generosity, marketing savvy. or stupidity. There are enough deliberately free hot-spots—Toronto Hydro once made one that covered all of downtown—that it cannot be said any time you connect you should know you're stealing. That is what passwords do for both sides of the issue. Besides, if the 'provider' has no cap, or has room beneath it, it would be difficult to assert there's a cost, or harm from connecting and certainly her ability to use her service is unimpaired. Hard to call it theft when you've still got the goods.

The wallet on the parkbench isn't quite the same. And it's rather different from finding a small stack of toonies there. Absolutely it is stealing to take either; they're not ours so it's theft. But the toonies are anonymous, and the loss to whomever has happened already. My bet is that for everyone of us there's a size of that stack small enough that they'd go into our pocket. We have treasure trove laws and finders keepers to guide us, as we have the computer laws quoted earlier, but they are a long way from truly answering the situation.

It's actually quite insightful to see the value of having the information superhighway as accessible as the physical sidewalks, streets and roads. They benefit all of us individually and collectively, which is why we pay for them—mostly—by taxing all of us, irrespective of our use of them. And no one suggests the tourists are stealing the streets they drive on. Our old wired telephone service was somewhat similar in that all residential customers were charged/taxed the same basic service rate, allowing pretty much everyone to have a phone and connect with their community without considering costs of every call. It made Canada the world's leader in phone usage, and Bell's supplier Northern Electric a leader in technology, Of course that system broke apart with the 'need' to maximize profits at every point. Service is so much better.

And now that mentality's driving the public sector as well, so what was public is now increasingly for sale. Like roads. Nonetheless, eventually we do come to see some things as public goods—police, most roads, schools, water, sewers, hospitals—and for them the ordinary definition of 'stealing' has to be tweaked. As we evolve to that view, some of us resist and lag, some bulldoze thoughtlessly forward, and some can't find the path at all. Which is why all of us, like the OP's brother, should take active care to protect ourselves, and not leave it to others. Can't assume we're all going the same way.

And there are those who have never thought how wi-fi got into the air at all. "What? Is that what wi-fi is? It just works whenever I turn on my 'puter, you mean it isn't free? How would I know?"

 

[fuji]

Hard to call it theft when you've still got the goods.

You could say the same thing about people who illegally hook up their cable TV. What did it actually cost Rogers? Nevertheless it's illegal.

The rest of your post seems to be an argument that the law as it stands should be repealed, as you disagree with the principle embedded in that law. That may well be, but for the time being that law is really there on the books.

In general I agree with the point that there isn't going to be some sort of police crackdown on people who connect to open WIFI. The only way you'd ever get charged there would be if it were in connection with some larger criminal activity, and then the police would toss unauthorized access to a computer into the mix just to put an extra nail in your coffin. I also agree that in many cases you might plausibly believe the public had been invited to use the service--whether that's true will depend on the situation.

I mean if you KNEW it was your next door neighbour's internet connection, and that he did not know it was opened to the public, and you went and slammed his connection and cost him a lot of bandwidth charges--I think there's a case there that you should be punished. But in the more general case I agree it's too trivial to be worth pursuing, even if it is technically still illegal.

 

[oldjones]

Clearly some people do cause harm by purloining services. Like all theft—taking what isn't yours—that should be deterred, and the punishment should reflect the harm done. But it isn't as cut and dried as going into someone's house and taking something, or picking up a lost wallet and taking the money before you drop it in a mailbox. Or taking the change out of a vending machine tray. Or using a parking meter someone else has paid for. All are theft by someone's definition, just not in the takers' view.

As with the twenty dollar bill you picked up from the gutter, which certainly wasn't yours, there's more to figuring out what's right and wrong than simple little definitions. Which is why there is a special-case law providing for computers, and why we have invented insurance and bicycle locks (You mean it wasn't even locked!! What did you expect? Just don't tell the adjuster or the cops when you call for a case number.) That is all I was saying, never that the law should be repealed.

Meantime what am I supposed to do when there are three open routers called NETGEAR and LinkSys that my MacBook occasionally prefers to my protected one? And am I stealing from Rogers (I've never had cable, it's a real question) if I, as a customer, add another jack or jacks? Bell gave up on that one decades ago.

Bottom line: As with the bike and its lock; sending a broadcast signal freely into the air and expecting no one will pick it up and use is is too foolish for the community to offer much help or sympathy, for all that it is wrong and a crime to take advantage of a simpleton that way.

Just a BTW on TV cable theft: I've always thought that's more like copyright than theft. If I take a book from a store, it cannot be sold. But Rogers still has the original goods—its signal—to sell. What I 'take', if I hook up illicitly is their opportunity to rent me their service. Which I have so far resisted. It's just as if I'd bought a DVD my nephew copied, instead of the real thing, which I might never cough up the big bucks for. That's yet another definition of 'theft', and tenuous enough to haveneeded its own name. It's also appropriate in 2011 Toronto to recall that there was a time that book publishers called free lending libraries thieves, and tried to block sales to them. And they had a point, although we've all done better out of the opinion that went against them. That 'knowledge and communication are public goods' thing rises again, if not exactly Free Speech!.

Getting a Kindle™ this Christmas? Hmmm.

And to the OP: Tell yr bro, not just to put the password on the router but to take the option that has it not announce to the world it's there. he likely could have gone on for years unprotected if the leechers had to prompt the router for the connection.

 

[goalie000]

I thought you still needed a password to access a hotel or restaurant' s free internet?

 

[oldjones]

I thought you still needed a password to access a hotel or restaurant' s free internet?

All depends on how they set it up. Motoring down to Florida we found everything from wide open, available in the parking lot at the A&W, to a simple password on the menu blackboard, to places with secure passwords that had to be written down they were so long, so unguessable, and so unmemorable.

 

[anonemouse]

The IP address would have most likely been assigned by your router to the intruders computer. It is useless information to have.

What might have been handy is the DHCP name that the intruders computer used when it requested the IP address. These might actually be descriptive, something like 'Dan-PC'. It likely wasn't logged, but maybe only seen during an active session on the router.

There would also be a MAC address registered during the wireless session. These might help you determine what kind of computer it was, and if you find the computer, uniquely identify it.

You can hire a geek to set up a trap - open/easy wifi access, lots of logging, and packet analyzers to see if you can catch them logging into a POP/IMAP server, etc. Lots of effort though - best to just move on.

+1, this is bang on.

You could set a trap to catch the person with some technical help, and it could work. It would be troublesome and could end up costing money. It's not anywhere near worth it.

Tell your brother to call the Internet service provider to see if they will reverse the charges.

Either way, it's time to move on.