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Florida Man Charged For Stealing Wi-Fi
baldass_newbie writes "The Saint Pete Times has a story about Benjamin Smith III who was arrested for stealing a wi-fi signal in Saint Petersburg, Florida, where apparently wardriving is considered a third degree felony." From the article: "...xperts believe there are scores of incidents occurring undetected, sometimes to frightening effect. People have used the cloak of wireless to traffic in child pornography, steal credit card information and send death threats, according to authorities. For as worrisome as it seems, wireless mooching is easily preventable by turning on encryption or requiring passwords. The problem, security experts say, is many people do not take the time or are unsure how to secure their wireless access from intruders. Dinon knew what to do. 'But I never did it because my neighbors are older.'"
So it's about 20% unprotected, 40% badly protected and 30% badly protected if WEP mode is used by clients.
Ok, here's my dirty dupe detect flow...
When an article is "posted" the first thing that happens is every link in the article is compared to a URL_table that only has links, and the ID of the article linked.
If there's a match, return the user to the posting page, put "DUPE ALERT" at the top, and give links to all the matching articles. Then the poster can use his most powerful computer (brain) to see if they are truley are, and they probably will be, URL's are pretty unique.
If there is no match, then post the story, and add all the stories links the URL table.
Here's what needs to be in the URL table:
ID, StoryID, URL
Pretty simple eh?
Want to make it have less false positives?
ID, StoryID, URL, Date
Then when you do your match, only look for matches in the last year...
Somebody make a patch, I don't know perl.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Well, Otter, I've got to say congratulations; you're the first person on the other side of this argument that I've seen make a reasonable point that might hold up. And I read the first /. discussion too.
The point I'm congratulating is the confrontation argument. If the owner of the AP actually came out and told the leech to get off his network, then yes, I'd agree that the leech needs to leave or face these felony charges.
That said, my reading of TFA does not suggest that this happened in this case. TFA says Dinon (the AP owner) approached close enough to the vehicle to see Smith (the leech) close his laptop. But it does not say that Dinon actually spoke to Smith at any point, or told him to quit using the network.
Now, if you want to say it was obvious from Dinon's actions that Smith wasn't welcome, we get into muddy water. But I don't think that's enough...imagine the case where somebody shoots somebody knocking on his door without any warning and then says "well, he could see I was lookin' at him mean like."
The other half of your point is not as meritous. The AC who has already replied to you says it about as well as I could: the nerd logic is the logic that matters when we're talking about networking policy. If I can't trust the network's automatic authorization, then I also can't connect to google on port 80 without permission. The entire Internet requires that we defer the jobs of authorization and authentication to automatic processes, and the owner of a wide-open AP is doing just that.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Why don't they just make a small poll type thing on each post to vote if it's a dupe. If there's enough votes, the post is removed.
And this is why I don't pay for a subscription to slashdot. Until the editors can be bothered to care about the site, no way I'm paying my hard earned cash.
this is getting old and so are you
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