If I'm stupid and leave the door to my house unlocked and you come in and take something - it's not stealing? The implication (unless an attractive nuisance like an unprotected pool etc.) is in favor of the property owner/resident.
I did not overtly invite or intend for you to enter my house or take my stuff, I just forgot to lock the door...
There must be some "common sense" that says if not overtly offered, and if in doubt, leave it alone. If the owner intended it to be public and did not post it on a hotspot list, then heed doubt, wait until you're SURE it's OK to use it. If you DO NOT KNOW the owner's intent - DO NOT ASSUME - to ASSUME makes an...well, you know.
Grabbing something seemingly unattached is, as many of us were taught, simply wrong.
If I leave a bar stool, or walk away from my latte and Sunday paper to use the restroom is that an open invitation to drink my beer/coffee/take my paper?
Do you take tips off restaurant tables?
Unless there is an obvious lock, there is NO sign either way - "access and take/use me" nor "it's my house/bandwidth, leave it alone". Defer to doubt - don't use it.
The (wireless) 'bandwidth' you are taking advantage of is not yours unless you put it there, and the backend Internet Service provided 'bandwidth' you are taking advantage of was not sold to you.
Another twist I suppose is opening a street-corner phone box and grabbing a line with a set of jumpers - the phone company put that box there out in the open, it must be for me to grab any line I want. The neighbor's TV cable is flapping in the breeze - air is there to breath - it must be OK for me to take some of the signal for my use.
I could be really harsh and pose:
How dare you, how presumptuous, self-centered and vain of you, to assume that things are simply there for your benefit. You did nothing to earn or deserve it, did not even look it up to see if it is open for your use. This is not a free-for-all Oklahoma land-grab.
The other side of that is - if you can locate the owner - let them know you found an open AP and ASK THEM if that's what they intended. It might do them a HUGE favor - which would be a nice thing to do.
It could be said that honey-pots and hackable systems accessed to acquire others' goods, etc. are there for your discretion as well, when indeed that is not the case and there are laws about such things under various circumstances.
It matters NOT that neophytes buying stuff at Fry's, etc. are too naive or ignorant to truly know what they are doing by leaving an AP open. YOU are smart enough to know that it's NOT yours to take. An ignorant but deliberate act to simply use bandwidth you are not sure of, like missing a speed limit sign, does not excuse you from wrong - by legal, moral or ethical standards.
A knowledgeable person in deliberate act to the contrary is certainly in the wrong and you know it. Don't try to twist things and make excuses. It's not a political conservative/liberal thing - taking without permission is a foundation principle of civilized people.
At 12:00 PM 1/4/2003, you wrote:
From: Julian Bond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Can we try and get away from this word "stealing". There's been quite a lively debate on alt.wireless about this. I've been trying to argue that if an AP has WEP off, provides DHCP which provides an IP, gateway and DNS, then as a guest I'm both morally and legally justified in assuming bandwidth is being offered. As a good citizen, and out of self interest I shouldn't abuse it, but I can't see anything wrong with using it. Others are arguing that I ought to get more formal authorization first and make some effort to find out who and what is providing the bandwidth. And that just because I can use it, doesn't mean I should.The problem I have with all this is the practicalities. Windows and particularly Windows XP will just go ahead without me doing anything. We know that there are lots of open hotspots out there that are not deliberate but there are also lots that are. We've got no convention for SSIDs that imply free sharing. And the most difficult problem is that it could be very hard to find the owner. The example I gave is Bryant Park. If I'm in the park, and I see WiFi with an SSID of NYCWireless I can guess what it is. If I'm in London and see "ReadyToSurf" what do I do? How about the SSIDs I'm seeing round London "UK-LON" with no WEP, DHCP and DNS? I have no idea who's running them or what they are. And I can't think of any way of finding out. My concern is not really for us insiders. It's for the average laptop user who doesn't know an SSID from their nose. If they open the laptop, Win XP gets a connection and they read their email, who's at fault? We should also recognise that the whole debate is happening because the industry isn't providing the tools or guidance to allow AP owners to make a deliberate choice over whether to share or not. Aberdeen is predicting that the home-residential market will get the lion's share of shipments this year. An awful lot of those WLANs will be setup using factory defaults on the AP and be connected to ADSL or Cable thus inadvertently sharing their bandwidth. This is *NOT* a problem until somebody abuses it and gets them thrown off their ISP for violating the ISP's AUP. The failure was that we didn't give them the tools to make a deliberate decision. The result will be a load of Government-Media noise about how free internet access will bring down western capitalism! And that doesn't actually help anyone. -- Julian Bond Email&MSM: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Webmaster: http://www.ecademy.com/ Personal WebLog: http://www.voidstar.com/ CV/Resume: http://www.voidstar.com/cv/ M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173 T: +44 (0)192 0412 433
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