What Ravenman said plus this… wireless networks are not one-way broadcasts. Everytime you enter a URL or click on a link, you are making a request of your neighbor’s network. So even if you claim finders-keepers on the signal invading your home, you’re invading in the other direction. What would be the justification for that?
The point here is that if you have an AP operating in such a way that someone can pick it up in their own living room, you have no recourse to complain if you refuse to enable WEP and/or MAC filtering and someone uses your bandwidth. You didn’t just “leave your door open,” you went into someone else’s house, left a desirable and useful object on the kitchen counter, and then tried to prosecute someone for theft when they used said object.
People who leave their APs open deserve anything they get. They’re creating an attractive nuisance and need to learn how to operate their equipment properly. If they don’t, they have no right to complain if they don’t like the consequences attendant upon their choices.
That being said, anyone who uses open bandwidth should be cool and not go snooping into other computers and take stuff or do harm–that’s crappy and it’s peeing in the pool for everyone else.
In my experience, anyone who can’t figure out WEP is HIGHLY unlikely to know or care that their bandwidth has been narrowed.
I’m also amazed at people who browse in open hotspots with every flipping file on their hard drive open and shared. Do these idiots even know how much they resemble a drunk, rich tourist who doesn’t speak the language flashing a huge wad of money to the natives? It’s like they really want to be hacked… :rolleyes:
Have you ever been outside of a major metropolitan area? Ever driven around Texas, Montana, Idaho, hell, even non-coastal parts of California? We’re talking about immense areas, and a lot of these areas actually have a huge portion of the country’s population in them. The majority of Americans live in small towns, not big cities.
Is your point the word ‘unprotected’? 
I think I agree with what others have said though. You can’t put up walls to keep out radio waves. (Well, maybe you could, but they’d have to be really thick and more trouble than they were worth.) If it’s clear that a wireless signal is private, you should stay off it even if it’s broadcast into your property.
Hmm… maybe I should change my wireless signal name to something less misunderstandable.
Maybe so, and I agree totally with the principle that things should be secured to discourage theft, but it’s still theft.
No argument there, but even so you’ll find a grand jury remarkably less likely to prosecute a theft when the victim carefully placed $20 bills in a path right up to a big flashing neon sign pointing to a spendy item–the sign flashes “hey, take this!” in large friendly letters of several languages.
The line to “theft” becomes rather blurred when the ostensible victim is throwing stuff around–one could just as easily see it as a gift. 
If you mean the concentration of signals or WiFi hotspots, no, I don’t.
I know places in Wisconsin where there is a plethora of open signals to choose from. Are you arguing that the quantity of signals makes a difference as to legality of accessing any one?
Allow me to introduce you to Hermiston, OR a barely populated area with way more tasty watermelons than people, which is also the largest WiFi cloud in the country. It was actually cheaper to do WiFi than to string phone line into these areas and the bandwidth is much better this way. WiFi is THE way to go in lightly populated areas, and has the added benefit of allowing VOIP to compete with the legally sanctioned monopoly of local telcos.
The “attractive nuisance” principle is totally new to me. It appears from my limited reading, though, that this specific doctrine is related only to things that could lure children into harm’s way, presumably because minors can’t be expected to discern their own endangerment like a legal adult. Being an adult, I don’t think I could argue the unsecured wireless network was too attractive an enticement to expect in any legal sense that I should be able to resist it. I do wonder about a scenerio where a minor used it to IRC and wound up getting diddled my some child molester weeks later, though…
Just to add some technical knowledge – MAC addresses can easily be spoofed in software. Plus, if I recall correctly, there’s been at least one company (years ago) that got in trouble for using someone else’s address blocks in their hardware, thus avoiding the licensing (?) fees.
In Linux (haven’t used it on other OSes), there’s a wonderful little tool called ethereal for capturing and analyzing network traffic. Whenever I see my network usage spike for no reason (generally 2-3 times a week if I turn iptables off), I fire it up, capture some packets, and shut down my NIC. Every single time it’s someone doing a port scan or trying to make an unauthorized connection to my PC via ssh. I get the IP address from which it originated, do a reverse lookup for the registered owner of that IP address block, and email their “abuse” address with the information.
Not sure what else I could do, but at least I make an attempt to get them in trouble.
That’d be all well and good if it hadn’t have been factually demonstrated in the OP that such people do have a right to complain to law enforcement authorities, who will prosecute and convict people who carry out the activites you’re describing.
I suppose it is technically stealing, however I don’t lose any sleep over it. When you buy a wireless router it comes with very easy to follow directions, step by step I believe, on how to set-up some security, MAC filtering at the very least. If you are to ignorant/lazy to bother setting something up correctly I have no problem with using it. I do use free wireless all the time (not at my house, I have it but I have security), and I feel no guilt about doing so.
However, if my neighbour left their door open and a yummy pie sitting on the table (or cooling on the window sill) I wouldn’t even consider taking a piece. Even though locking a door is a tad bit easier then setting up wireless security (not that I have ever seen step by step instructions for door use).
Not sure what this says about my morals.
Here I am. Not rich, not a tourist, but I sure don’t speak the language.
I don’t know what you just said. “open hotspots”? Files that are “open and shared”? Frankly I’m leery of Googling these terms, and I don’t know where the glossary is.
An open hotspot is basically anywhere within range of a wireless that allows one to log on. Without proper precautions, when connected to the hub, your hard drive is another shared volume on the network. It’s quite conceivable someone would exploit the desire for something free, luring the unprotected with unrestricted high-speed internet. You download dirty movies. They rummage through your personal files.
<tangential hijack>
A friend of mine routes his cable access through a Linux server, with a bunch of machines behind it on a local network. No firewall, as he only leaves a single port open (ssh). Turns out someone set his IP address as a gateway, which allowed them access to his internal network (also secured, but not quite as rigorously maintained). After finding this person scanning his internal machines, he set up the firewall.
The point being, if your data is accessible in any way, someone will find out how. And wireless is much harder to keep secure than wired.
</tangential hijack>
Actually, no. All you need is a Faraday cage: an enclosure lined with grounded conductive screening with holes whose maximum diameter is less than 1/10th of the wavelength of the radio waves you want to block.
IIRC, the grounded conductive surface shorts out the electric field* of the radio wave, blocking it.
I spent quite a bit of time tuning radios in such a cage. It was a roughly-constructed room of 2x4’s with a layer of grounded copper screening on the inside of the frame, and another on the outside. The door was also screened on both sides, and had copper fingers around it to join it electrically to the frame. AC power inputs were filtered.
The wind could blow through the cage; I had no trouble talking to people outside, light shone in, but bring an FM receiver inside and close the door, and the receiver would receive nothing. Likewise, a radio transmitter insiode the cage could not be received outside when the door was closed.
The cage let us tune radios without disturbing anything outside. Among other things, we could tune radios that were not licensable to use in Canada. Since we sent radios all over the world, this was handy.
A microwave oven is also a shielded enclosure. The mesh in the door of a microwave oven is radio-wave shielding.
Tinfoil would work nicely to make a Faraday cage. 
[sub]*It’s blocking magnetic fields that’s a bitch… I think you have to use superconductors to do that.[/sub]
Define “shortly”. Let’s assume that we’re talking about 80% of the population, which is pretty generous.
Okay, thanks. Now a question.
Setting up that WEP thing is not all that easy. I did exactly what the manual said and everything looked just ducky (to me). Then my son told me that he could get my signal from the Starbucks across the street. (Whereas I have a hard time getting a signal on my laptop from my basement.) And to prove it he typed up a quick file and sent it to my printer.
So I said, “Okay, so they get my signal, so what?” He went on to detail dozens of bad things that could happen, including somebody getting into my secret files, but he was too busy making a gazillion dollars a year as a network programmer or something to fix it for me. To him it is easy, to me it is all one great big mystery.
How would she prove it was accidental and not an intention to commit a crime?
Isn’t it a general principal of US law that you are innocent until proven guilty? Wouldn’t the burden of proof be on the prosecution?