Man Arrested for Using Open Wireless Network

DaCool42 writes "In Tampa Bay, a man has been arrested for using a wide open WiFi AP. The St. Petersburg Times has the full story. 'It's no different if I went out and bought a Microsoft program and started sharing it with everyone in my apartment. It's theft,' said Kena Lewis, spokeswoman for Bright House Networks in Orlando."

Comments

Re:Open doors

[Kethinov]

You mean the free internet I'm getting from my neighbors isn't legal? :(

Re:Open doors

[PopeAlien]

It remains unclear what Smith was using the Wi-Fi for, to surf, play online video games, send e-mail to his grandmother, or something more nefarious.

.. or quite possibly.. ALL OF THE ABOVE!

For safeties sake lets just outlaw the internet.

Re:Open doors

[Anonymous Coward]

No and if you keep clicking on those damn slashdot goatse links I'm seriously going to turn WPA on.
-your neighbor

Re:Open doors

[Mythrix]

Or it's like this:
Someone bought a wireless router to share his internet connection at home with the rest of his family, but he didn't bother to setup any security.

Then someone outside of the house connects to the wireless router to use the internet connection, without the owner of the router knowing or approving this.

...wait, what were we talking about again?

Re:Open doors

[alta]

I think in this case I'd say you left a set of tools sitting in the guy's kitchen, in his way.

I have exactly the same problem, I have my laptop setup to auto-connect to the best network because it's very convienent while traveling. Then suddenly the guy in the office downstairs gets an AP, puts it on the same channel as mine (dumbass) and leaves it insecure. So I suddenly get connected to his stinking network and all my servers are unavailable. So I went down there, had a talk with him about security and for free, secured his network. 2 weeks later, it's called linksys again and it's insecure. I go down and ask him why "Oh, we had someone else come in, and we couldn't find the codes (he meant wep keys) so we just reset it. Great hu?"

Yeah, great....

So now, I have a WAP that I sat as close to his office as possible. It's on the same channel as his, it has an antenna pointing at his office, it's wide ass open, the SSID is linksys (even though it's not a linksys), and it has no connection to the internet. awe......