Imagine you’re a customer, and the computer tech is at your house trying to fix your laptop. You don’t have an internet connection. Here’s the choice the tech gives you:
“In order to fix your computer, i need to download some drivers and other files. For this, i need an internet connection. One of your neighbors has an unsecured wireless connection that i can use. It’s officially illegal, but i’m not going to hack into his account or anything; i just need few megabytes worth of stuff. Otherwise, i have to take your computer with me and do all of this back at my workshop, which means that, instead of getting the computer back in an hour or so, you’ll have to wait until at least tomorrow, and possibly a couple of days.”
What percentage of the OP’s customers do you think would choose the second option in this case? Would it be greater than 2 percent, do you think?
I have built PCs from the ground up. I have troubleshooted more problems than I care to mention. I have fixed PCs for other people on numerous occasions. I’ve even been paid for my services (not as any sort of business or anything, though).
I’m definitely relatively savvy, and I still use wired connections to this day. I simply do not trust the signal strength of WiFi. Some people swear by it, but I don’t mind a few LAN cables strewn about if it means I’ll have solid, uninterrupted transmission.
This would mean, of course, that they’d have a wired connection for you to use. I’ll give you that, but don’t dispel someone as being an idiot simply because they don’t have internet access. Plenty of people are on a tight budget.
Obviously a VAST majority of customers would not choose this route. They would not give two shits if the guy subsequently stole all the passwords/vital information from a neighbor, so long as the PC gets fixed. A bit of a stretch for exaggerating purposes but I absolutely agree with you.
All it would take is that 2% (or hell, we’ll say .05%) to notice and get reported. Even then, most bosses/companies would not be likely to do anything about it, but that in no way makes it any more ethical.
I’m not sure there’s any correlation between wi-fi and intelligence. My mother’s a pretty intelligent person, and she doesn’t have wi-fi because her computer sits permanently on a desk in her spare bedroom, and she has no need to be connected to the internet from other parts of the house.
It sounds like the company should get a portable 3g hotspot, like Verizon’s Mifi, for on-the-spot downloads. Or if you bought one yourself, drachilix, you could presumably write it off on your taxes as a legit business expense.
I agree though, I think you’re underpaid. I wonder if it was even his laptop? How was he getting his limewire downloads without internet?
Have you ever had people bring you stuff you know was stolen?
When I opened this thread I thought it would be just another clueless luser story. It far exceeded my expectations.
drachillix , if you want to get a free T-shirt out of this, write it up and send it to The Shark Tank at computerworld.com.They’d use it. And, unlike your customer, they do pay up. I have a shirt from them, and my story was nowhere as interesting as yours.
We’ve had several long threads about the legality of stealing unsecured wi-fi. The upshot appears to be that while it’s technically illegal, nobody has actually been prosecuted for it (though several people have been prosecuted for doing illegal things while accessing somebody else’s network).
But, for me, the ethical question is a different issue from the legal question.
I understand, i guess, why lawmakers saw fit to make it illegal to use an unsecured wireless network belonging to someone else. To tell you the truth, though, i think that the ease of securing a network, especially with modern WPA-enabled routers, makes such a law rather pointless. If you buy a router, you should secure your own network if you don’t want people on it.
Also, as long as they’re not actually trying to hack into my computer or constantly using huge amounts of bandwidth, i wouldn’t really have any problem with someone piggybacking on my wireless connection to check their email or download a few small files. I don’t really consider such limited use to be unethical.
Apart from security, the main reason that i keep our wireless network protected is that some people are greedy. Rather than simply using open networks for quick browsing or checking email, they’ll do stuff like run BitTorrent clients or stream movies, which uses up lots of bandwidth and degrades my own internet experience.
I was staying at the apartment of some friends in New York a couple of years back, and i noticed that their wireless router was not protected, and that other people were leeching off their connection. I asked them about it, and they said that they actually kept it open on purpose, in the spirit of sharing. I really liked that idea, and their public-spiritedness, but i felt obligated to tell them that they were running a security risk.
Also, and almost as importantly, it was clear that the presence of multiple piggybackers was significantly slowing the speed for the connection’s owner, and this was because at least one of the freeloaders was constantly running torrents. So i set up a password and locked everyone else out.
You know if Mr Smith really didn’t want anyone using his wifi he could spend exactly 5 minutes setting a password, or MAC filtering. If it’s DHCP serves you connection data it looks to me like an invitation. YMM
We have a wireless USB cellular gadget (mobile broadband from Virgin Mobile). I could have spent another 50 bucks to get one that acted as a WiFi router for several devices but figured I didn’t need it.
Anyway - basically, they are just like a home Wi Fi router except that rather than being connected to your FIOS / cable modem / DSL modem, they use the cellular network.
drachillix, I assume you carry a laptop of some sort when going on these calls. I would suggest you acquire such a cellular gadget. Mine requires a 10-20 dollar top off card, then that buys me some amount of total download volume (increases the more you top off at once). If I don’t need it, I don’t top it off.
My son kept his wifi open until the day that he found that one of his neighbors had somehow tweaked his (the son’s) router to recognize his (the neighbor’s) signal as five devices, hogging the bandwidth in a big way. I don’t know which was the bigger offense: the sheer nerve of doing that or the fact that it messed with the WOW.
It might of actually been five devices running. Either all the devices had wifi, or they did something like set one of them to be a bridge to their own lan. Your son would see 5 devices because the neighbors lan and his wifi network would be functionally one network, for the most part.
Areas of Clovis, CA do have free public WiFi but in the cases I had seen, people were connected to a neighbor, internet went down, called us, we go out to fix.
No router, no modem, no internet service.
They showed me how they connected.
It had been to a neighbor who recently secured his network.
I have had 4-5 calls like that over the last few years.