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Jailtime For Leeching Wireless?
jginspace writes "A 17-year-old from Singapore is is facing three years' jailtime for accessing his neighbor's wireless network.
His neighbor complained and now the unfortunate Tan Jia Luo is facing charges under the computer misuse act and is scheduled to appear in court on Wednesday."
False. Yes, most consumer ISP service agreements forbid this. There are significant exceptions. And almost any ISP that has any non-consumer operations will sell you a connection that you can share if you're willing to give them enough money. I have a "legal" open wireless network, with the permission of my ISP, and so do lots of other people. There is no reason my users should assume my network isn't legitimate.
If you leave a network wide open, you are doing the only thing you can to invite people to use it. Absent information to the contrary, there's no reason it should be forbidden to assume the good faith of such an invitation. If your ISP service agreement doesn't permit you to share the bandwidth, then you need to close down the network, or somehow put people on notice that they can't use it. Only you, not the users, are in the wrong if you don't.
Uh, an open AP is literally an invitation. Nobody is hacking your wirez, you are actually broadcasting the availability of a service. Another great example of getting pissed off at someone else because you didn't read the damn manual. It's a FIVE PAGE BOOKLET. It HAS PICTURES. They literally DREW A PICTURE FOR YOU.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
though Mr Cheo said software tools are available for download that can track who is using a network and what they are doing on it.
Yeah, it's called your router's software.
My old 802.11b wireless router died a few years back. I didn't have a laptop at the time, but my girlfriend did. It was literally 6 months before we noticed that her laptop wasn't connecting to our router, but rather a unsecured wireless router in the building. It was just automatically connecting to what's available.
This is not "stealing" network access, or "breaking in" to your house. This is a device, available for everyone nearby, which is constantly broadcasting packets saying quite literally "Hey, I'm here! Does anyone want to connect to me?" Your computer then says "Hey, I'm a laptop. This is my network card identification. Can I get on your network?" The router then says "Sure, hop on. I'll route your packets."
This is not someone coming to your house and attaching alligator clips to your phone line. This is YOUR router, working in YOUR stead, behaving exactly as YOU have configured it to. This is like a secretary whom you've told to let anyone into your building. If you can't be bothered to train the secretary in the simplest of fashions (and putting a password on a network isn't exactly rocket science), you shouldn't envoke the police when you find they have let random people into the building.
If you can't spend the ten fucking minutes to put a password on your network, you shouldn't waste the judicial system's time when people access it.
The ______ Agenda
The neighbor knew how to check if someone is using his wireless network, but doesn't know how to secure it? An open wireless network is an invitation for anyone to use it.
Internet access through a wireless network that is probably connected to a ADSL modem has fixed costs. The guy really didn't lose anything. So he just doesn't want anyone else to benefit from something he has paid for.
The charged teenager is 17 years old. The neighbor could have told his parents what he was doing and they could have told him to stop or take away his computer...
Sounds like the neighbor wanted someone to use his network, so he could sue them.