That is not a correct analogy. When you use a wireless AP, you send signals *back* into the house and down the lines to the ISP, etc. Even if Joe's Auto Insurance doesn't pay for the activity on the wires, someone does. So, you may not be stealing from Joe, but rather the ISP. Someone up the line is having to pay for what you're using. Jimmy On Sep 21, 2004, at 12:55 PM, Crispin Cowan wrote: > Warren Harrison wrote: > >> actually, there is an Oregon statue: >> 164.125 Theft of services. (1) A person commits the crime of >> theft of services if: >> (a) With intent to avoid payment therefor, the person obtains >> services that are available only for compensation, by force, threat, >> deception or other means to avoid payment for the services; or > > But what if the "service" is *not* intended for pay? I.e. I'm hanging > around some street corner, and my wifi picks up the WAP for "Joe's > Auto Insurance" located above me on the 2nd floor. Joe clearly is not > offering any WAP service for pay. It is ambiguous whether he intends > to just share his connection for free, or if he meant to close it down > and forgot. And really mucking the intent is if Joe didn't even know > this was an issue, and thus had formed no actual intent either way. > I agree that using an open access point is unclear as to whether or not that constitutes theft of service. One analogy that seems applicable is say Joe has a small home with a walkway to the driveway and a sidewalk along the front yard. When Joe comes home from work the walkway is too dark for him to find his keys so he installs a light. The light is bright enough to light up the walk, the front yard, and part of the sidewalk. Bob is walking down the sidewalk at night and wants to read the piece of paper in his pocket. He stops at the right spot on the sidewalk so that Joe's light shines on his piece of paper. The light that bob used could be said to be unneeded or even a side-effect since it was going to hit the sidewalk and not be used for Joe's original intent of lighting up the walkway to the front door. Is this theft? Possibly the best answer is to have a policy indicator in the beacon packet that states the intent of the access point owner. Since we don't have this in 802.11b, the next best thing could be to use an essid of a community wireless group where its fairly well established that the standard essid of the group is meant to indicate that free open access is allowed. don --Apple-Mail-23--615739203 content-type: application/pgp-signature; x-mac-type=70674453; name=PGP.sig content-description: This is a digitally signed message part content-disposition: inline; filename=PGP.sig content-transfer-encoding: 7bit -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (Darwin) iD8DBQFBUKC1v0pPFWG+3lkRArqIAJ0WJPGgmYn/ocvF8xTE8S7klFEMvgCfc0yL 2oYWstGWPvkmhisdirwRX8k= =SAdc -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --Apple-Mail-23--615739203--
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