That big dog will protect your house while your gone.

That gun will be stolen when your gone.

So, if your gonna have a gun, get a big dog to protect it

Why would I need that? The gun is on my hip with a CCP in my wallet.

Don't even need a ccp here.

How about arresting an owner of the open broadband for incitement to commit a crime? Let's go crazy all the way...

it is an odd state of affairs that most people would find completely unreasonable in any other field.

The cable to my neighbours phone passes over the top of the corner of my garden, and they haven't made any attempt to protect it, so I guess I can use it too

Well, in the UK it is not theft*, it is copyright violation, but that still doesn't make it any less wrong.

*Here that means removing and illegally depriving something from its recognised owner, I don't know what the US definition is.

Thanks for prodding me to clarify, tabletrat. I meant "Theft of Intellectual Property", which in the case of digital media is the same as copyright violation.

Well, no but it is a matter of degrees. As previous examples have said, if you leave your car outside the house unlocked and someone nicks it then yes, they have committed a crime, but your insurance company won't pay you the full value of the car as you didn't take reasonable steps to secure it.

If you have a metered service and someone has leeched all your bandwidth which you didn't take steps to protect the you are still going to have to pay for that bandwidth. It doesn't make the other person any more right though.

Really wireless networks should be made so that by default they are protected and to have them unprotected requires more specialist knowledge to setup.

Apologize if the posts have moved on from the flashlight analogy, as I see people are discussing this issue in more technical terms (Iball, where do you even get those law posts?)

However, I just wanted to give my 2 cents on unauthorized Wifi usage as being an extremely minor offence (i'm just assuming email checking, like what the UK guy was arrested for, and not hacking or torrents/illegal downloads), that you could argue the following:

1. Intensity of the intrusion is low
In the flashlight example (one neighbor turns on this light inside his house, the glow outside akin to Wifi, and another flashes one a flashlight into the Wifi owner's house, akin to accessing the Wifi by sending a Wifi signal from his wifi adapter), this 2 way communication has very similar levels of intensity, and if the flashlight is flashed into someones eyes, or invokes suspicious behavior, I can see how this is not acceptable.
However in actuality, Wifi access (for emails) accesses a very small amount of bandwidth (negligible in some cases if the access line >3Mbps), which we cannot say its hardly causing any trauma. I liken this 2 way communication like an echo of a radio blaring, which the radio sound returns back to the radio owner at a fraction of the original amplitude.

2. Wifi connections extend beyond the owner's property
Analogies of leaving the door open and stealing a TV in an extreme exaggeration compared to an actual wifi access. Again, wifi access is a transfer of Ghz waves that does not cause monetary damage, and does not include actual trespassing. If we really wanted to use an analogy (which does not really illustrate a wifi access, but shows no trespassing), lets say that if you found a penny in the street, would it be okay for you to pocket it?

I think lets get away from using analogies and stick to the actual wifi access, as analogies tend to over simplify, leading to exaggeration of the actual issue.

Depends on whether you mean legally or morally. I don't think that morally anyone would have a problem with you keeping it, but at what point does it become morally unacceptable, £1*, £5, £20, £50, plain brown bag full of notes?

Unfortunately laws have to be written, and they either get written with woolly language like 'acceptable' and 'reasonable', or they get an absolute limit, and in the world of IT, any absolute figure is going to look silly in a few years.
Or you just write 'you can't do this', and although most people will get away with it, if to some policeman that doesn't like the look of you, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time for you to get done.

It is really hard to write a law saying 'you can't intrude into someones network, unless you want to just check your email, and it is only briefly or in passing, and only if they have it open'



* Obviously finding a $1 where I am would be unlikely and also completely unhelpful! ** Luckily with the exchange rate now, just multiply by 2.
** actually thinking about it, not so useless, I am in the states for a 2 week holiday in september!

The penny example IS a bad analogy, but that doesn't ipso facto discredit certain other analogies made.

There is significant different between picking up a lost/discarded coin on the street and intentionally connecting to another person's paid service. Perhaps not seeing that induces a person to misunderstand the relevant analogies?

Using analogies to shed light on a subject CAN be very helpful, but only so long as the intended audience can grasp them. When people scoff at relevant analogies and/or pose irrelevant analogies of their own, that tends to indicate a fundamental lack of insight into the actual issue. That's very difficult to overcome, especially if sheer argumentive stubbornness is the cause of the impasse.