HouseofMike

Police have arrested a man for using someone else’s wireless Internet network in one of the first criminal cases involving this fairly common practice.
Benjamin Smith III, 41, faces a pretrial hearing this month following his April arrest on charges of unauthorized access to a computer network, a third-degree felony. …

A felony?!
That is just absurd.
It can be easy to ‘accidentally’ connect to someone’s open access point. I can do it quite easily sitting in my living room. I have several neighbors that have their access point’s wide open.
I guess if I leave my property then it becomes an issue.
IMHO any wireless network that uses NO security what-so-ever is inviting people to use it and this fellow shouldn’t be charged for doing just that.
The access points do come with instruction manuals, if these users can’t read then they should pay a kid $20 to setup the security.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 9th, 2005 at 11:42 pm and is filed under Politics, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.