Wow...opened a can of not-so-cool beans! I am not trying to corrupt the company or anything like that. All I wanted to to was be able to to check my facebook and yahoo e-mail when I was on break.

All security breaches are taken as a serious matter regardless of the breacher's motives or intent. This is the reality. Your safe choice is tethering the N810 to a personal cell. This will also be to your benefit from a privacy standpoint. Anything that moves on a companies network is subject to inspection and even storage.

I'm right there with ya, but it can't be done effectively on the tablet. The cost of a cheap laptop that would allow you to do so is still significantly more expensive than the cradlepoint 300 and a couple months of mobile broadband. As an added bonus, you get online wherever you go.

Things cost what they do and the consumer has to decide if the benefit justifies the cost. For me cell data is very overpriced and it's use too controlled by the carriers. I'm freelance and only use cell for voice. A $7.95 per month Boingo mobile account and Starbucks is my out of the of the office choice for email. If I'm really hard up I can even, dread, find a McDonald's.

Perhaps the real costs are what motivated the factory owner(s) to secure the network in the first place... Lost time and legal liabilities!

How long before more hourly workers start using the network? Start playing network games? Start streaming network media? Start posting in social networks from the factory IP? Pron? Etc.

Unfortunately in the US some hourly wage employers feel the need to make the employees paid time as tedious as possible.

In these situations some hourly employees tend to find anything to help relieve that tedium. Some are quite ingenious too!
Sometimes these employee schemes end up costing the employer more than what the security was designed to "save" in the first place.

If breaks are scheduled for everyone at the same times, the smart play for the employer may be to provide free access only during those times.

***

As more and more of our personal lives are managed and conducted on-line, I have a feeling that timed internet access may be used in the future as a means of crowd control or to prompt simple conditioned responses.

Say this guy figures out all the stuff he needs and he does use this at his place of business on their network or he goes to one of those paid hotspots to use it. What could get him caught short of him bragging about it ?

The problem is that you made your position in the matter very clear: you do not have permission to do what you are asking us to help you with. You're asking us to aid you in doing something to a property without the owners consent. Thats the same as you're asking someone about lockpicking with the clear intention of burglary.

Someone on a shooting range doesn't want to know why the person wants to learn shooting either. Same for say martial arts. We assume the person has good intentions and leave it at that. But if the person clearly states his/her bad or questionable intentions we must bail out.

You can ask the network owner for permission, or you can ask someone who does not know your motives for help.

Ok. As someone who operates a corporate network, let me tell you how this would go.

My access points are routers, running DD-WRT. They're configured for WPA-PSK.

After banging on the network for however long that took, our hero here would finally get connected. And the router would note a new connection, and tell my network management system about it. The NMS would look at the MAC address listed in the packet, note that it doesn't recognize it, and send me an email about it, which my mail system would forward to my BlackBerry, annotated with the manufacturer name derived from the first 3 octets of the MAC.

So, here's this email saying "New unknown wifi connection from 'Nokia Danmark A/S': 00-00-00".

Gee? I wonder who (else) has an n800 in the building and knows the passcode I didn't give them?

Users tend to think about wifi access as "getting to the net". Network managers tend to think about it as "keeping unwanted people out of my fileservers".

Now, stipulated, your wifi in a corporate network shouldn't *be* inside your firewall; users should be required to VPN in to your corpnet even if it's your own wifi they're on... but most people still don't do it that way.

NEVERMIND!! GOD, simple questions get unsimple answers!!

Ah, life as it should be...