(All this *&^%$#@ top-posting has made it unwieldy to continue
to quote, so I've just tossed it all. See the sclug archives
for context.)
This comparison to theft or trespassing against physical
property tend to be pretty noxious. Not as noxious when the
comparison is made with regard to intellectual property
"piracy," since bandwidth is close-ended whereas copying is
open-ended, but still.
Let's look at what happens when you connect to one of these
deployed-as-it-came-out-of-the-box cable/DSL router access point
combination devices:
The router, to no one in particular: Hello everybody, here I am
and here's my SSID!"
Your laptop says: "Hi there, here is my MAC address! Does
anyone have an IP number I can use, please?"
The router replies: "Sure! Here's an IP number you can use,
and here is the netmask, and the gateway,
and oh, by the way, I'll forward along
your DNS queries too, while we're at it."
Now. Someone may say that it is theft of service, and perhaps
someday even make that claim stick. But from where I sit, it is
perfectly legal and even ethical to broadcast the DHCP request
at the very least. In fact, the operation of a great number of
legitimate wireless networks depend exactly upon laptops making
those kinds of requests.
The access point doesn't *have* to respond to that request, and
in fact many of them do not do so. It doesn't even have to
broadcast its SSID announcing its presence, and in fact, the
ability to turn that off is a feature of at least some of these
devices. Both of these features are over and above the
configuration of any WEP or MAC-based restrictions.
To me, it comes down to informed consent vs neglect. On the one
hand, many people do not know their devices are set up that way,
and perhaps if they knew they might seek to change the
configuration.
On the other hand, can we really assume they didn't intend to
set it up for public usage? I don't think we can, and clearly
they intended to purchase the thing and plug it in and use it,
so there's a lot of very deliberate action the demonstrates a
positive intent to do *something*. Nodes put up by community
wireless groups like http://www.seattlewireless.net are
certainly intended to be used in this fashion. It's not at all
unreasonable to infer that someone has been inspired by that
example and intends to operate in the fashion that they do.
The inference is particular strong if the network name has been
changed from the manufacturers default, since that demonstrates
that someone has at least gone into the configuration software
and made at least that one change.
--Joe
