In Illinois, riding piggyback on someone else’s Wi-Fi could cost you some money.
David M. Kauchak, 32, pleaded guilty this week in Winnebago County to remotely accessing someone else’s computer system without permission, the Rockford Register Star newspaper reported. A Winnebago County judge fined Kauchak $250 and sentenced him to one year of court supervision.
“We just want to get the word out that it is a crime. We are prosecuting it, and people need to take precautions,” Assistant State’s Attorney Tom Wartowski told the newspaper.
John has written about this type of situation previously.
So what’s the consensus: Should it really be a crime to use an open Wi-Fi connection?
This isn’t the same as music blaring across the street and my dancing to it serendipitously. In that case the music’s owner knows he is sharing his music with anyone who passes by. The router’s owner may not have known.
Total crap and irrelevant. The owner doesn’t need to know or care if he is sharing his music / radio waves. Once they leave his property they come into the public domain.
If my neighbor buys a phone that operates on the same frequency for the sole purpose of using my phone line without paying (and without my permission) that is theft of service.
If you buy a cordless telephone and people can access it then you have a problem with your phone.
First, the phone will not operate unless the phone is off the cradle, opening the circuit. Then the pirate phone would would need to commandeer the owner’s phone in order to dial. A regular phone can’t do it. It would take special equipment to do it, not a phone.
Second, cordless phones are coded and operate on different frequencies each time they are picked up from the cradle. At best, someone could eavesdrop on your call, but not take over your phone or make their own calls. It is illegal to eavesdrop on someone’s telephone call without a court order.
I think one main point, which has only been touched on but deserves more discussion, is that Wi-Fi connections (both Routers and your receiving Wireless card) are ACTIVE connections. If you happen to live near an open Access point, have a wireless card in your computer, and turn your computer on… according to the “it is illegal” group you have just committed a crime. The Access point ACTIVELY seeks new connections for its network, and likewise your wireless card ACTIVELY seeks new networks to connect to… In most cases this begins as soon as the OS has been loaded. They are already communicating, the only way to avoid this is to turn off your Wi-Fi radio, which would defeat the whole point of Wi-Fi.
It is like post 23, where the neighbor thought he was using his own wireless network, but was in-fact using the network next door. His computer didn’t care that he had typed in the WEP wrong… it probably didn’t even notify him it couldn’t connect to his home network. It probably looked at what networks were available, and what networks were willing to communicate with it, and just preceded connecting to all of them until it found the fastest one it could chat with, and connected to that.
I live in a Wi-Fi dense area, and my computer, on boot, connects to a different network out of the gate every time I turn it on. I have my own network set as the “preferred provider” but if my Wi-Fi card thinks someone else’s signal or bitrate is better, it doesn’t ask… it simply connects… If I wasn’t tech savvy enough to catch this, should I be arrested / fined for my computer hardware doing something it was programmed to do?