UK Man Convicted For Wi-Fi Piggybacking

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.

Comments

Open AP?

[jshriverWVU]

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

Re:Open AP?

[drinkypoo]

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.)

Re:Open AP?

[ehrichweiss]

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.

2005 story

[iangoldby]

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.

This guy was behaving rather strangely..

[vorlich]

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.