Morality Corner
By Dan O'Connor April 19th, 2007
In Networking · Sharing · Stories
A couple of people have been arrested in Worcestershire for using other people’s wi-fi connections without permission. The MO for the crime is kind of mundane - apparently, the wi-fi thief sits in his or her car outside your house, covers their car window in cardboard (premeditation!) and helps themself to your wanadoo or whatever.
So I was thinking… It’s obviously wrong to steal folks’ wireless; it slows down their connection, which they paid for. But I’d bet that most of us have done it at one time or another. You probably ought not to be terribly surprised to find your connection slowing down if you don’t protect it with adequate security. Of course, that’s almost tantamount to saying that you deserve to get burgled if you forget to lock your front door. Only almost, though, because no-one deserves to get burgled (or have their wifi nicked) but you will increase the likelihood of it happening if you don’t lock your door (or get an encryption). I’m not justifying wireless theft, I’m just saying that’s why it happens.
There’s also something curiously transpatial about wireless theft. Imagine: there you are, in your house, and you switch on your laptop and it picks up next door’s wifi. Are you justified in thinking, “Well, their wireless is in my house…”? Isn’t it a bit like being morally and legally entitled to cut the branches from a tree which is drooping over your fence?
I’m tempted to ask for a show of hands on who’s committed this very twenty-first century offense… but you never know when the Worcestershire police may be listening in…
1 Nigel Shardlow // Apr 23, 2007 at 3:47 pm
In my capacity as roving IT support person to my hapless friends I was, just before Christmas, called in to lock down tight the WiFi network of a friend of mine who had just suffered the indignity of having his and his housemate’s computers impounded for six weeks whilst police swept their hard drives for the naked pictures of little girls that they (the police) had identified as having been downloaded from his WAN IP. My friend, and his housemate, are both gay men.
Needless to say, the only porn they found was of men, and all legal. Returning the machines, the police said it was likely to have been a neighbour poaching their open wifi connection. They also said they weren’t even going to try to find the neighbour, which I thought was a shame and a bit of a wasted opportunity.
In locking the network down, I set my friend’s SSID to be ‘NO_PAEDOS’, by way of gentle discouragement.