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The Ethics of Stealing Wireless Bandwidth?
sjwoo asks: "So I was over at a friend's apartment yesterday, in an attempt to fix up her computer (goodbye, buggy Windows ME, hello somewhat less buggy Windows XP). I had most of the updates already on CD, so the only one that caused me grief was a new driver for her HP printer, which was 22MB. Her Internet connectivity was provided by AOL dialup, and because we had to be in class, I had to do what I could to hurry things along.
I found an unprotected (i.e., no WEP, no MAC-address protection) WLAN and sucked down that file at over 200Kb/sec. Was I wrong to steal?"
"At home over my cable modem, downloading this file would have taken a couple of eyeblinks, but as I clicked on the download over her AOL connection, I saw that the ETA turned from 45 minutes to 68 minutes to 94 minutes! I had less than 10 minutes, so I did what a few of you might do: I turned on my wireless laptop and looked around the apartment building in search of a connection.
Later, I considered the ethical aspects of my action. I kinda felt a little guilty for tapping into this guy's connection. Surely it's possible that he wanted to have an open network to provide strangers in brief need of broadband connectivity, but most likely, he's just some person who doesn't quite know what he's doing."
Cars isn't a good analogy, because, number one, with Wifi there are plenty of public access points or folks who leave their networks open on purpose. With a car analogy this would be like people who leave cars laying around the city for anybody to use. That's not common and wouldn't be a good excuse for cars, but maybe it would be for wifi.
Number two, you can tell one car from another pretty easy. With computer thats automatically associate to the strongest signal, or to "any" access point, it's common to connect to the wrong network (maybe you've had problems like this, I have.. people in the next office associating with the wrong access point without realizing). This would be like if all cars were identical and we were blind, or something..
Treat this like land: if you put a No Trespassing sign, then you can say trespassers are breaking the law, but if there are no signs, no fences, etc., you can't really blame people for cutting across your property once in a while. There are No Tresspassing signs available, everybody knows how they work, so go buy one.
If we treat this like the car, instead of like the plot of land, I think that's a mistake.
Also, let's say you DO want to ask permission. How do you do it? Who owns the network? How do you find out? There's an easy solution to all of this: if you don't want casual use of your network, put a password on it. Or at least name the station "GO THE FUCK AWAY" or something that makes it clear it's not open for the public.
The problem with the open door analogy, is that if someone steals things from your house or car, you no longer have them. Downloading through someone else's network does not cost them anything. Sure, if they were for some reason using all their bandwidth at that point you might cause a bit of lag, but then again, if they were using that much bandwidth, you wouldn't get a 200kb/s download. The only complication is if, like ewhenn said, their bandwidth usage is metered. In that case its wrong unless you pay them whatever miniscule ammount it cost.
Actually I would say a better question is 'what are the odds of me getting caught?' And the answer is 'very slim.'
... I found it when a friend of mine was at my place, looking for a cable connection for his laptop to check email. It was a new IBM with built in 802.11b and it asked if I wanted to use the ambient signal it found, first clue. I went out the next day and bought a 802.11b card for my laptop and sure enough, signal. Weak signal, but still. (I bought a base station also so I could use it without the moral implications and in case it went away...)
In my 'hood someone had their Linksys WiFi (I will get around to explaining how I knew in a minute) up without WEP enabled, just plugged it in and let it go
I got to dinking around with his system, recognized by the IP address it assigned me that it wasn't an SMC unit, probably a Linky so I tried to connect to the console using the default password and Voila! it worked.
I was at a neighborhood gathering the other day when I asked 'anybody know who Alex or Erin are?' (the hub was broadcasting the name alexerin) and one guy says 'That's my daughter, why?' I let him know I was tappin' it from time to time (his network, not his daughter) - and explained to him how to lock it up. He had no clue.
Next day it was WEP enabled. Maybe I shoulda kept my mouth shut, I got better reception from his AP than from mine in certain places in my house / back yard.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer