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."

Comments

It's only airwaves -- and unlicensed ones, at that

[Deagol]

If some satellite company goofed and beamed unencrypted HBO over the northern hemisphere for 24 hours, would they have a legal case to sue people who tuned in? Of course not!

So, if you're broadcasting your access singnal, unlicensed and unencrypted into another residence, I say all bets are off.