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UK Man Convicted For Wi-Fi Piggybacking

Posted by kdawson on

CatrionaMcM tips us to a BBC story reporting that Gregory Straszkiewicz, a UK resident, was fined £500 and sentenced to a conditional discharge for 12 months after being caught using a laptop from a car parked outside somebody else's house. '[H]e was prosecuted under the Communications Act and found guilty of dishonestly obtaining an electronic communications service.' A separate BBC story notes that two other people in England were arrested and cautioned for sharing Wi-Fi uninvited.

10 of 659 comments (clear)

  1. Open AP? by jshriverWVU · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How does one figure out if the AP is for public use or just someone who forgot to set it up properly?

    1. Re:Open AP? by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Do you think he would have gotten a 500 pound fine and 12 months probation if he had hacked into a secure network?

      What I think is that 500 pounds and 12 months' probation is fucking ridiculous when you're not even causing any harm.

      If he WAS causing actual harm, then I would limit his financial obligation to paying the victim for actual damages.

      The fact that he was fined 500 pounds proves that this is about grabbing money from people, not keeping people from using open APs (which is impossible anyway.)

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:Open AP? by slart42 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Uhh, the utter lack of advertisement that it's for public use?

      My WAP is open. It is intentionally so. My neighbours or anyone just generally passing by are free to share it. And people frequently do, according to my router's logs. It's not that I'm constantly needing those 6 MBit myself, so why would I mind anyone else using them. I see the fact that the network is unprotected as invitation enough for anyone to join in. I don't see myself posting ad banners around the street saying "Please share my WiFi" (and if I did, i might actually run out of bandwidth at some point).

    3. Re:Open AP? by mahmud · · Score: 3, Interesting

      He provides the prosecution with numerous logs showing that he is not the only user of his WAP? Or are we talking about legal system where one does not need to prove suspect to be guilty beyond reasonable doubt in order to convict him?

    4. Re:Open AP? by ehrichweiss · · Score: 5, Interesting

      My neighbor's access point is a crappy linksys wrouter that he got several years ago. He uses WEP but I can crack that quicker than he can type in the key. Does the fact that he is using a known-to-be-weak encryption scheme mean that I have the right to be on? My other neighbor does not advertise his SSID, but I can get on his AP just the same simply by grabbing enough packets out of the air. Does that mean that I have the right to use the service he's paying for?

      No, as a matter of fact, encryption is THE way to tell if you're allowed to view satellite communications, at least here in the States. If a provider does not encrypt their signal, they have no(as in none, zero, zip, nada, nothing..) legal grounds to say that we can't watch their programming; however the moment they encrypt it, one can become liable for signal "theft" if they decrypt it without permission. The same needs to be applied to the Wifi arena. Laziness on the part of the "system administrator" should under no circumstances be grounds for the little twit to bring you up on criminal or civil charges.
      --
      0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
    5. Re:Open AP? by jotok · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Please, can we stay away from the analogies? I don't think they're especially productive.

      You argued that if I don't know how to control the behavior of the technology I bought, then I'm still at fault for the results. So if someone's client connects to my AP because they don't know how to modify its default behavior, why are they not at fault? I submit that this is a double standard.

  2. Crime to use open wifi? by MoHaG · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So accepting people's invitation to use their Wifi (by not securing it) is a crime...

    It is the same as accusing someone of copyright infringement if they listen to their neighbor's CDs because their sound system is too loud...

    PS: I still need to RTFA

  3. 2005 story by iangoldby · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Did anyone notice the date on that first story?

    Last Updated: Thursday, 28 July 2005, 08:51 GMT 09:51 UK
    That first story (with the £500 fine) was two years ago and concerned someone who hijacked a wireless connection.

    The second story (the new one) concerned two people who were cautioned for using people's wi-fi broadband internet connections without permission.
  4. This guy was behaving rather strangely.. by vorlich · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The BBC page: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/herefor d/worcs/6565079.stm is quite clear that residents called the police because this man had screened off the windows of his car with cardboard but the light from his laptop was still visible in the early hours of the morning.

    Goodness only knows what he could possibly have being doing in there but I guess the local constabulary decided to charge him with a crime that they had evidence of.

    So less a story about those brave wardrivers liberating the net from the bourgeoisie and more a story about someone wierdo having a wank.

    If that's a slashdot word.

    --
    Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
  5. Re:no it should not by tinkerghost · · Score: 3, Interesting

    An inanimate piece of equipment cannot grant your legal authority to someone

    Per your interpretation, you have just engaged in criminal computer tresspass by using the slashdot web site. You requested permission to use the system (through your browser), that permission was granted by the system (through the web server). Since a piece of equipment cannot grant legal authority to someone, you had no authority to use the system.

    There is no technical difference between the protocol exchange in the HTTP & the 801 series, both are automated request/response protocols which grant authorization.