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Possession of Cantenna Now Illegal?
Mad-Mage1 writes "The recent arrests in Florida and the UK of men who were accessing unsecured wireless hotspots has created a flood of articles that contain panic inducing rhetoric. "A small subset of computer-savvy hackers has the know-how and gadgets for more nefarious activities," claims the Sacramento Bee (via Techdirt). "They're (Pringles cans fashioned into antennas) unsophisticated but reliable, and it's illegal to possess them," quips Sacramento County Sheriff's Lt. Bob Lozito of the Sacramento Valley Hi-Tech Crimes Task Force." I hope they tell Fry's about all the illegal antennas they're stocking, too.
I'm sorry, but how can an antenna possibly be illegal? If that were true, then a long piece of wire would now be illegal too.
Hrm, no, we're talking 2.4GHz, I guess that would actually be a *short* piece of wire, my bad.
But regardless, it's like saying owning a screwdriver is illegal because it could be used to take the hinges off an insecure door. Dumb.
Don't be an ass. Your door doesn't send out signals that scream "Please come in and use me" to every person that passes by either. This isn't like breaking and entering, and assuming no protections are enabled, it is perfectly legal and SHOULD be perfectly legal to access the network. It's like operating a web server on port 80, but not telling anybody. If I connect to your site, and it serves me a page, I am not breaking into your network. If you run an open access point, I connect, and it gives me an IP address, I am not breaking into anything and I went to no effort to get connected.