Is it wrong?

By bckhough

30 Mar

If you are using your laptop computer and an unsecured wireless network appears and you use it to connect to the net, are you wrong? Are you bad? Unethical? Deserving of punishment?

Filed under: Religion, Technology

6 Responses for "Is it wrong?"

Aaron March 30th, 2006 at 10:14 am 1
Nope. The person who failed to password-protect their wireless signal is guilty of stupidity, and stupidity should always be punished. Fining someone for using an unprotected WiFi signal is ridiculous.
Kables March 30th, 2006 at 10:58 am 2
If internet access were a pay-per-MB industry, I could see how this would be “stealing,” along the same lines as tapping into someone’s electricity or water line. But to hop on to someone’s unprotected wi-fi is, well, more like taking a nap on someone’s front lawn: tacky, but hardly punishable. Put up a fence, for crying out loud!
dupree March 30th, 2006 at 3:52 pm 3
You are evil and are going to hell.
Brenda March 31st, 2006 at 9:58 am 4
Wireless Home Security article

My question is, is it really such a big deal to secure your home network?
joey jojo March 31st, 2006 at 1:16 pm 5
I have gone so far as to log into wide open routers and turn wireless off. The owner probably returned it thinking it was broken.

I think the punishment for using open APs is should be about as much as a speeding ticket. Of course a more fitting punishment would be to have your account passwords snarfed by the AP owner and have your email read, bank funds transferred around.

The problem with securing wireless networks is that it is not necessary to make it work. If you plug it in and it works why mess with it*? Also, not all access points are created equal and are not compatible with all computers. They only sure way to make it work with everything is to make it wide open.

*if you have ever worked front line help desk support you know how afraid people can be of tech.
Kables April 1st, 2006 at 10:37 am 6
Most of us have seen how afraid people are.

At what point are companies selling consumer goods going to start adhering to basic tenets of good security and default things to off? (Not security off, but openness off, in this case.) How hard would it be to engineer a Linksys or Surfboard to force the user to password-protect her router (even if it is only WEP) the first time she opens a browser after plugging the router in? Not hard. I think marketers could capitalize on the angle of a secure home network . . .