Having thought about this a bit I would like to make a point. There mere presence of any open network does not give you permission to use it. It may be stupid to leave your network connection open but that in itself does not give you permission to use it. Again the presence of other open network connections which you can use, or are given explicit permission to use, does not imply that all open network connections are yours to use. If the majority of open network connections are ones which you can use then assuming a particular open network connection is one you can use would be ok. Then it is the responsibility of the network owner to either protect the network or find some other method of telling people he would not like his network to be used.
Obviously you’re wrong, because there are literally millions of intentionally open wireless networks in this country. People DO give the service away free, constantly. You’re wildly, completely wrong.
Would you feel okay if someone did the same to the front door of your home? I certainly wouldn’t. That’s why, as I’ve said quite a few times now, the property of a private individual should be given the doubt in favor of the privacy of the owner, but it is more reasonable to assume that businesses are in the business of serving customers. If you’re in a Starbucks and you find a public network, I’d say there’s a very good chance you’d be using a service knowingly offered to the public, even if there are not signs posted in the store. I don’t think you can make the same assumption for a network in a residential neighborhood without more evidence of intent of the network owner.
Just to throw this question out again, since nobody took the bait: is there any doubt in anyone’s mind here that the most common explaination for unsecured networks with default settings is that the owner probably didn’t know how to set up his network well?
I don’t think that it is common practice for most Americans to offer services to the public, especially if the person has to pay for the service in the first place. I don’t offer free water, phone calls, or electricity to people in my neighborhood. There certainly are some people who may offer wifi to the public, but I think that folks looking for free services from private individuals are not on solid ground by assuming that they may take what others must pay for.
On the other hand, a business like Starbucks may often offer water, electricity, internet, and bathroom services to the public in order to make customers happy. It’s more reasonable to assume that these companies want you to use their services, I don’t think it is reasonable to jump to a conclusion that private individuals are offering the same services without more evidence.
I thought I did. The part about FREE INTERNET FOR DC RESIDENTS was intended to answer your question. I’m sorry if it didn’t answer your question, perhaps I did not understand it correctly.
If someone overheard that conversation, I’d say they’re probably on decent ground to use the network. In that situation, however, I would encourage you, as a matter of being a good neighbor, to walk next door to Fred at some point and ask him if it is okay if you use it.
You can assert this as much as you want, but you have no basis. Many, many, many private individuals leave this open purposefully. The man in FLA, for example, stated outright that he knew how to secure the thing but chose not to. Your assertion is bare and carries no weight.
A front door is not a wireless network. Can we address the issue at hand rather than poor analogies?
Yes. There is doubt. Literally every single person (and we’re talking in the high dozens, between friends and caller at my job and neighbors) under the age of 35 or so that I know to have set up an open wireless network, did it on purpose. Every one.
Because those are not trivial to set up in such a way as to satisfy three requirements which are satisfied by an open wireless network.
- Available without trespassing on your property.
- Available at no actual cost to yourself.
- Available with no or manageable risk to your privacy or security (particularly applicable in the case of theoretically allowing people to use your phone line).
I’d agree with this, but the problem again is an attempt to relate unrelated things. Many private people DO offer open wireless networks, while not offering people to come use their toilet and get a drink.
Going back to the web site analogy… at some point, around 15 years ago, the web was just coming into existence. It was not common knowledge that if a site is listening on port 80, and you can request files from it with a certain protocol, then it’s probably meant for public use. At that time, it was just a strange new service, one that the majority of servers didn’t offer at all.
The presence of other open network protocols (ftp, telnet, gopher, etc.), by your logic, does not imply that all open network protocols are yours to use. Do you think it would’ve been reasonable if Tim Berners-Lee had sued someone for connecting to his web server before he had publically announced it?
Were you addressing me or ntucker, who made the reference that I quoted re: a business having its doors open to the public? It seems that you also missed my larger point about deference to the privacy of an individual, which, as far as Strunk & White is concerned, is not an analogy at all, but you managed to ignore anyway.
Color me a little skeptical that your friends are representative of the US as a whole. The full version of the St Pete story
makes note that some people map out wireless connections in order to offer to fix the security holes (according to the article, sometimes for a fee). I find it hard to believe that anyone would attempt to offer this service if there were not a market for it (ie, computer users who need to be educated about their system). Even Mr 2001 doesn’t seem to be arguing that everyone who leaves their wifi on public does so intentionally.
The law makes no mention of these factors. The only relevant fact is whether or not a person has permission to use the network, full stop.
Another thing to consider is that the homeowner is potentially not the only victim here. Whatever company provides service to the homeowner certainly should have some say about how their service is used. I can’t imagine that ISPs are willing to authorize the general public to use their services with only one customer paying a rate that is intended to be for his own private use. Shouldn’t the ISP have something to say about who is authorized to use their networks?
In other words, if Joe Blow sets up a wifi network for his whole block, in what way does Joe have the right to decide on behalf of Verizon/AOL/Earthlink/whomever that dozens of people may use the service the ISP provides if there is only one customer paying for the service?
Yes, but this is already covered. A homeowner who shares his internet connection with his neighbors is probably in violation of the contract he signed with his ISP.
Most ISP contracts have a clause about that, but some ISPs (Speakeasy comes to mind) explicitly allow customers to share their connections, and even encourage it by helping customers meter their neighbors’ use and charge them for it.
However, the ISPs that don’t allow customers to share their connections are doing it to make money by requiring everyone to pay for a separate account, not to avoid being taken advantage of. The amount of your ISP’s resources you use is determined by the limits on your account (or technical limits like modem speed), not the number of people who are connected. Even if I opened up my wireless network and let all the neighbors use it for free, I still couldn’t use any more bandwidth than I do now, because the total bandwidth my cable modem can use is capped by my ISP - it would simply be divided among every user, making everyone’s connection so slow that they’d go and open their own accounts anyway.
No, I obviously would not. However, I had an expectation that this place, being a place of business, was implicitly inviting me in if the door was unlocked. That’s pretty reasonable, and definitely not the case with my front door.
I neglected to answer this before, but I think you’re absolutely right. For my job, I have literally gone on end-user studies where I went and watched users attempt to set up wireless networks in their homes (in an attempt to better understand what people have trouble with so we could make the software easier to use). It was extremely common to see people skimming the manuals say, “hmmm, encryption…security…hmm. That sounds hard. I’ll skip it.” The attitude was generally, “who cares if someone else can connect to my network? Who’s going to do that anyway?”
www.seattlewireless.net is a project where real people all over Seattle provide free wireless access using their personal equipment just because they think it’s a cool thing to do. There is a big difference between wireless network access and those other utilities you mentioned: if someone logs onto my network and surfs the web for a while, the impact to me is negligible, and costs me nothing.
My hypothetical was specifically asking about a situation where the owner of the network knowingly set it up as open, but did not indicate his intention in any other way. You caught it in your last response, thanks.
Incidentally, what do you think of my free couch analogy? I think it’s actually fairly decent.
Well, my understanding is that there’s a substantial area of well-tested law relating to abandoned property, in which the owner of something just simply wants to get rid of it, and whomever takes it, gets it. The problem in relating that to wifi is that the owner of the wifi network is dealing with something intangible, and also dealing with something that he may or may not wish to share, as opposed to abandon. Judging by the controversy in this thread, I’d say that establishing an intent to share is much more complicated than establishing a straightforward intent to abandon.
Seems to me that the abandoned couch analogy would hold up much better if a wifi network was a static item. It does not have to be tangible, I think. For example. If my wifi were always on, and guaranteed to always be on and I told my neighbor, " I’m off to Bali for 14 months, I am abandoning my wifi network which will be active 24/7 in my absence- but over which I now lay no claim of ownership, since I’m gone" , ,that might work. OTOH, you as the signator to a contract that gave you the wifi signal in the first place are responsible. I would guess that even if you do everything you can to “abandon” a wifi network, you cannot. It’s yours by dint of the end user agreement you signed when you got the hardware and started the service.
Hmmmm.
I also challenge this assertion.
I have a Linksys Wireless router and the default state is unencrypted. You have to go out of your way to turn on encryption. The explanation in the book is pretty shitty, so I doubt Ma and Pa Kettle, who just got hooked up to the Internet, would understand what to do.
I too have limited bandwidth so if I had left my network open you would be stealing my bandwidth. Freeloader!
The water hose analogy should be more like this: I have accidentally left my hose running in my backyard. The water has dribbled under my fence into the street. You see it and think, ah, this guy has a hose, and you then come into my yard and drink from the hose end.
You have to have two way communication to use my network, and that is exactly like trespassing on my property since I have not given you permission.
My water in the street is not a green light for you to drink.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall it being “out of the way”. It’s clicking on the “use encryption” button instead of the highlighted “don’t use encryption” button on a screen in the setup utility.
Stealing? No. It is your responsibility to secure what can be, and in its normal operation always has been, assumed to be an open resource unless it is secured.
No analogies to trespass or taking things from your home are appropriate, for the obvious reason that neither of those are occuring. Again: open wireless networks are both common and legal, and next-best-thing-to-never require spoken or written permission to use. As with every electronic device or communications medium that I can think of, authority is, if not codified (see: illegal to crack password protection to gain access to a system), taken to be implied by the protocol (see: it is LEGAL to access public pages on the WWW or receive unencrypted satellite TV broadcasts without explicit authority).
If you don’t take steps to restrict access, a reasonable person CANNOT KNOW that they are not supposed to be there. If the standard is going to be “no access without explicit person-to-person communication of authority”, that’s fine, but then they better start writing consistent and applied laws to that effect; the fact that the Internet (not to mention unlicensed radio, etc) could not exist as we know it, and was designed by the same government making the laws in question as an explicitly open network, testifies to the patent absurdity of applying the “permission must be explicit” idea to this instance.
I’m going to be very interested to see if there is an official ruling on an issue in a current case working its way through Federal court (SCO vs. IBM). One of the “throw things at the wall and see what sticks” claims is that downloading unprotected files on a public web server is somehow unauthorized access. If the claim isn’t dropped by the claimant very soon on account of it being utterly stupid, it will be an interesting ruling and shed some light on the current question (because that is another example of an activity that is technically illegal by the statute that Bricker quoted earlier, due to an “Al Capone/tax evasion” out in 2(C)).
Again: nobody is coming into your yard or house. You cannot argue that it is analogous to trespass, because by engaging in that analogy you de facto posit that the underlying electronic communication (my computer connecting to your network) is to be treated as some real-world human action. If you posit that, the analogy fails because YOUR network is sending out an invitation and handing me the hose because of YOUR intention or negligence.
In that sense, you’re trespassing as well because you’re sending signals to my computer on my property. It’s inane and totally irrelevant. If you want to go that route, how about this: YOU left your wireless network insecure, so when I open up my laptop it automagically gloms onto that signal rather than my own without me realizing it, and now you’re sending packets to my computer and controlling my Internet access. Sounds to me like you’re not only trespassing, but trying to conduct man-in-the-middle and DOS attacks among others. I think YOU should go to jail!
Sounds dumb now, doesn’t it?
I was addressing you, which is why I quoted you (not being snarky, just making it clear). I didn’t miss your point, and you did make an analogy, which was inapt. The analogy was between opening the unlocked door of a private home, and accessing an open wireless network. It is inapt for reasons which have already been stated over and over (and which I rehashed a bit, again, in my post just above this one).
Oh, I absolutely agree. But there are, I’m sure, at least hundreds of thousands of intentionally open wifi networks.
I’m confused. Of course the law makes no mention of these factors. You were trying to equate laws against, for example, splicing into a neighbor’s electricity or water. I was countering by detailing why (other than the obvious fact that they are explicitly covered by different statutes) the situations are not equivalent.
Of course. Which, again, speaks not to someone’s access of an open network, but the requirement for the person who owns the network to exercise due diligence. YOU agreed to the terms, which de facto include being able to at least press the button on the setup screen that says “Use WEP” instead of the one that says “Use no encryption”.
He doesn’t. And it’s entirely irrelevant to the issue at hand, except inasmuch as it demonstrates another way in which the responsibility is on the network owner to practice due dililgence.
You guys are hung up on the abandonment aspect. It’s not the issue. The purpose of the analogy is not to say that a wireless network is like abandoned property, but to say that the practice of allowing someone to do something (as opposed to explicitly forbidding it) can, in cases, be reasonably interpreted as permission. Leaving your couch out at the sidewalk is reasonably interpreted as “free couch.” Many here (me included) would argue that leaving your network open is often enough intended to mean “free network” that it is reasonable to interpret that way.
I can definitely see the other side of this argument: just because a couple people leave their networks open for free on purpose doesn’t necessarily mean “open network” indicates “public access”. Just as “couch out by the sidewalk” doesn’t necessarily mean “free couch.” What you can reasonably infer is going to depend a lot on how common it is for “open network” to mean “public access”. It’s definitely not “never”, and it’s definitely not universal.
True enough. Perhaps it’s a rough analogy because the couch truly is on the sidewalk.
The wifi is being generated from well within their legal domicile- it does not exist on the sidewalk without existing first and primarily within their domicile because they chose to purchase access to it.
The peeking through the living room window and watching HBO for free analogy works better. A couch is a couch. It’s on the sidewalk and ( since in most places in the USA a person’s property line does not include a sidewalk even though they are legally bound to maintain their sidewalk section ), therefore on public property, the person who owns the house in front of which it sits cannot lay reasonable claim to it any more.
The wifi detected on the sidewalk exists because of hardware generating it within the house. To me, that’s the issue. The guy in Florida who was arrested did not sit on a couch- he availed himself of electronic property that was generated strongly enough to be read beyond the physical boundaries of the owner’s property.
Want to avoid this? Put a barrier around your house, or limit the strength of your wifi.
Or… encode and password the blasted thing. 