A quiet day

[altivo]

I did nothing exciting or notable other than making dinner: salad, corn bread, chili, and jell-o. ;p

Did routine animal chores, answered e-mail, read parts of the Sunday papers.

One brief article noted an arrest in Love's Park (a suburb of Rockford) of a man who was sitting in his car outside a non-profit agency with a laptop computer, using their wireless internet connection. Police charged him with "accessing a private computer system without permission from the operator" which is apparently against state law. He did not fight the charges. A judge fined him $250 and sentenced him to a year of court supervision.

I'm inclined to agree that this sort of activity is unethical. It's the same as hooking your garden hose up to the neighbor's house and watering your grass or washing your car on their water bill rather than your own. OK if they give you permission, but the fact that there wasn't a padlock on their water spigot doesn't excuse you for doing it without asking permission first. Whether existing laws can really be used to prosecute it though, I have questions. The law forbidding users to "access a private computer system" was written to stop hackers from breaking into computers. Stealing bandwidth from someone's wireless router without their knowledge does not really constitute breaking into any computer system.

Most routers can be locked down in several different ways, so there is really no excuse for allowing this sort of thing on your dime. That's what it amounts to. Since DSL and other access agreements are often limited to a certain bandwidth or a certain number of bytes transferred per month or week, unauthorized users can indeed be eating your lunch. Oddly enough, most home users of wireless LANs don't seem to take this seriously or for that matter even realize that it is possible, and neither do many businesses and organizations. I suppose there's nothing wrong with giving away wireless access to anyone who happens by if you feel like doing it, but at least be aware of what is happening rather than blissfully unaware of the implications.

Oh, and while we were sitting at dinner, rain started spattering on the kitchen skylights and roof. At first we didn't recognize the source of noise. Both of us thought something was boiling on the stove, but it was all turned off. It rained hard for about ten minutes. Neither of us thought there had been any chance of rain in the forecast, so we turned on the NOAA radio to see. They were declaring a "chance of flurries" for tonight. At the time, it was snowing in Wisconsin, they said. Since the temperature here was still 40° F., flurries were pretty unlikely. Another case of the NWS looking at their computer simulations instead of the actual conditions being reported.

Comments

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

You might as well ask if it is ethical to give something away for free if you plan to phone the police whenever anyone takes it. :-P

What strikes me as odd about this case is how they were able to determine who was "stealing" their bandwidth, or even IF it was being "stolen". They don't have the savvy to make their Wifi secure, so I am highly skeptical that they would have the savvy to have collected the necessary information to be able to prove in court that this specific person was "taking" anything. I predict that unless he confesses, there will be no conviction.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Actually, the victims of this crime (if it was a crime, which I question under current law) were completely unaware of what was going on. The arresting officer determined it based on observation of the accused's behavior. And yes, the "thief" did admit guilt and was sentenced to a fine and a year's court supervision. I suspect if he had fought it, he could have gotten off, because the law under which he was charged doesn't exactly apply.

I somewhat disagree with you about the ethics here. If a retailer displays items on a rack out on the sidewalk, is it ethical to steal them? If I have a utility electrical outlet on the outside wall of my house, intended to power an electrical gardening tool or something, and it isn't locked, is it ethical to run a cord over to it and use it to power your air conditioning?

If I leave my house door unlocked, is it ethical for someone to just walk in and help themselves to my possessions? Just because it is possible doesn't make it ethical. Legality in some of these cases may be fuzzy, and require more details, but I think the ethics are quite clear.

That doesn't mean that I am absolved of responsibility in these situations. Not locking the door is going to be construed as a breach of responsibility by a court, I'm sure, and probably by an insurance company as well. However, it isn't usual to put locks on utility outlets; furthermore, it is customary in many places for retailers to put displays out on the sidewalk regularly. They aren't expected to have someone out there to guard them. Instead, the honesty of the customer is assumed.

I'm not proposing that laws be made to clearly prevent this activity. I do think it's the responsibility of those who set up wireless access points to secure them in some way if they don't want Joe Anyone to use their bandwidth. On the other hoof, I still think it is unethical to take bandwidth in that manner unless the operator of the access point has clearly given permission, as some now do. Coffee shops, hotels, restaurants, and so forth are more and more beginning to offer that as a perk. Usually they put up a sign declaring their intent, and that's fine with me.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

If a retailer displays items on a rack out on the sidewalk, is it ethical to steal them? If I have a utility electrical outlet on the outside wall of my house, intended to power an electrical gardening tool or something, and it isn't locked, is it ethical to run a cord over to it and use it to power your air conditioning?

If I leave my house door unlocked, is it ethical for someone to just walk in and help themselves to my possessions?

Well, those aren't good examples because they aren't proportional to the value of the bandwidth that was "stolen" in this case. If you are tapping into an unsecured wi-fi you aren't going to get very good bandwidth outside of the building, so you are not going to be tranferring gigabytes of info, and therefore you aren't going to impact on their internet bill. I'd liken it to taking a sesame seed that fell off of someone's hamburger bun when they were eating lunch. They paid money for that sesame seed, and technically, it was illegal to steal it off of their table after they left the restaurant, technically you are stealing their food, but who really cares?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I think you are trivializing this inappropriately. I have seen people talking about how they are in fact getting gigabytes of bandwidth by living as parasites off a neighbor's unsecured wireless access, especially within apartment buildings or the like. Not being a wireless user myself, I have no actual experience with how well or how badly it works and at what distance, but I am going by what people keep telling me they are actually doing.

As I said in comments above, the loss may be trivial in many instances. However, where I live, bandwidth is still costly and hard to get. If you pay for a fixed number of megabytes per week or month, and someone else is taking them without your knowledge, that really does constitute theft even though you may be technically incompetent to recognize or prevent the theft.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

If the cost of the goods stolen was so valuable, then there should have been some form of restitution. But I don't think I'm trivialising it at all. Internet can't be any more expensive in a suburb of Rockford than it is where I live - he didn't drive up to a farmhouse.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Actually there are whole cities around here where you still can't get broadband. Things may be different in Canada, but here we are at the mercy of the telephone and cable companies, who only choose to serve areas where they can get the highest profit with the least investment. Where infrastructure needs updating first, it doesn't happen.

What exactly the situation may be in Loves Park, I don't know. However, according to the latest Statistical Abstracts, broadband is only available to about 62% of US residents in any form or at any price. In much of my county, even in towns and smaller cities, some sort of keyed wireless connection may be the only option (not to be confused with a wireless LAN, of course) where the subscriber puts up an antenna pointed at a cell phone tower or some such point, and pays for a limited amount of bandwidth per month. Beyond that, they are either cut off or charged by the KB.

Again, I am talking about ethics, not law. I agree that the law was misapplied in this case, but I also think that taking random bandwidth just because it's possible is no different from hacking the phone system or cable tv lines just because it's possible.

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

I think a better analogy would actually be a box out at the end of the driveway filled with stuff. If it's not clearly labelled as an "honor system garage sale" or something, should the average passerby assume that it's not trash just waiting to find a new home. Because, as I noted above, many businesses do intentionally give away their excess bandwidth, especially after-hours when most of the employees have gone home for the day. If someone isn't secure and they haven't so much as put a tag in their SSID that says they intend their network to be private, then the reasonable assumption is that they're providing a hotspot. It would be reasonable to expect, if you see "Starbucks" or such in the SSID, that it probably is intended for use by their patrons, but for hotspots that invite anyone onto their networks, well that's just silly.

And when I say "invite", I mean just that. A hotspot is an area where you're in good signal range of an access point that's sending out invitation broadcasts. Basically, it says, "I'm here! This is my name! Do you want to get on my network?". A secured access point will make the same broadcast, but when you tell your system to join the network, it will say "Okay, but do you have the password? Is your MAC address registered with us?", or a handful of other access control parameters. People just shouldn't be throwing parties with the front door wide open and a sign out saying "come on in!" if they don't want random strangers crashing the party. And they have no business calling the cops without even telling their uninvited guests politely to leave.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I agree with you in principle. In practice, though, that's not what actually happens. Just as with the cell phone industry, the example I cited elsewhere, the commercial interests involved will go to Congress and make a fuss. Congress doesn't understand technology but does understand dollars. They will pass some weirdly inappropriate law, probably unenforceable, and the president, who understands technology even less than Congress does (witness the "canned SPAM act") will sign it amid a big fanfare about how it now protects the privacy of businesses and individuals, while reserving his right as chief executive to invade anyone's network if he feels like it.

The FCC, under this mandate from Congress, will engage whatever enforcement it can in support of the law, and there you are. A big mess.