Calvinatir said:
I had the impression that if the signal was on your property, without a WEP or WPA then you could legally use the signal. Man, I've been wardriving before, made a GPS map of my area..heh
This argument makes a lot of sense to me, but I don't think that's the way it works, at least in the US. At least, the "signal was on your property" argument didn't hold for catching satellite signals and descrambling them, long before DMCA made the encryption circumvention aspect illegal. And same for tapping into someone's cordless telephone, in the days when they were analog and did not use any kind of encryption.
But then again, the article also uses the term "innocuous" to describe lifting WiFi but not committing another illegal act in the process. It's clearly illegal to lift someone's WiFi and capture their private information that way. It's clearly illegal to lift someone's WiFi and try to masquerade yourself as them to protect yourself from being caught for doing something like trafficking child porn.
You could easily make the argument, though, even in the case where you do none of this, and the subscription owner does not pay by volume (i.e. the cost is fixed per month and is not per MB), that you are compromising their quality of service, since you are stealing their bandwidth, and they are therefore unable to access their full purchased bandwidth....
The problem is that the practice of "innocuously" using other people's WiFi has become very widespread...lots of people who would never dream of doing something "not innocuous" do it, and many of them don't even conceptually understand that it's wrong. I know some people who do this and don't understand computing tech well enough to understand that they are using a private subscription someone else paid for -- they are just pleasantly surprised to find that their computer works on the internet when they move into a new apartment, and just assume that it's something they're allowed to use....
