Last month while I was on the weekend from Hell with the now ex-boyfriend(with friends like that, who needs enemas?), my wireless laptop was autoconnecting to a local wireless network(a company that has been in the news because of fraud that was committed by outsiders surfing in wirelessly on their network) that had no encryption and thus was letting outsiders surf in on their bandwidth.
Does this happen often to any of you?
How many of you see it as an ethical issue whether it is a company or a private home that doesn’t know any better? Would you tell them of your discovery and explain how to fix it?
Do any of you drive around with a wireless network sniffer to find where open networks are?
And along those same lines, I recently noticed that on my desktop, on which I still have dial-up, it always says “1394 LAN Connection connected at 400mbps” with a clock ticking. Does this mean someone around me has wireless?
I’m not trying to cheat anybody, I’m just genuinely curious.
As far as I understand it, hitchhiking on to someone’s unsecure wireless network is against the law. At this point, and until it can be clarified, please do not share tips, tricks or step-by-step directions on how to access or use someone’s unsecured wireless network.
A 1394 connection is a FireWire connection. Its top speed is 400Mbps, and is used most often to connect with cameras, camcorders, external hard drives, DVD and CD players, etc…
Unless you have a wireless adaptor hooked up to the FireWire port, it’s not a wireless connection.
Though it being against the law is odd. If someone leaves the access open, why is coasting through it a crime? As long as you just have the bandwidth and not access to their networked drives.
This happens to me, sometimes in offices, but usually at hotels. I once made several increasingly annoyed calls to Homestead Suites tech support about a flakey connection only to realize I was hitting someone else’s network.
For various reasons, I run my wireless network at home unsecured. If someone else piggybacks on it, that’s fine, too. I suppose I should figure out if I need to put up a page granting them permission.
Oh, and just in case: I wasn’t referring to you specifically, Mockingbird; I was giving a general warning to everyone who’d post to this thread. It’s easy to imagine someone asking “How?” and a helpful Doper answering with instructions.
I run a wireless network at home. I changed the SSID, disabled broacdasting of SSID and am using WEP. I can’t use WPA because my TiVo doesn’t support WPA only WEP. I also filter internet access via MAC and run a DHCP server that only gives out addresses to systems with an approved MAC address.
I don’t do this because I don’t want to share my network with you. I do it because I am responsible for anything that goes out over my connection. If you are downloading illegal files from a P2P network I don’t want MY IP to be the one that it tracks back to.
If you asked me for access I would add you to the approved list (but then again how would you know about my network to start with)
If someone has their AP open for public access then it is legal to connect and use it. The problem arises because you don’t know if the person meant to open it to the public or wan ts ot prohibit outside access but they just didn’t realize they needed to turn on encryption or change the SSID.