Hypothetical scenario: your neighbor has high speed, but the stupid internet provider won't service a couple hundred yards further to your house. Your neighbor has open wireless that you can reach from certain points in your house. Is it legal to tap into the neighbor's wifi? Is it ethical? Here's an interesting article on it: http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2005/07/wifi_scarfing_i.html My thoughts: if you're going to leave your wifi open, then you are giving anyone within its range permission to use it. And if it is both legal and ethical to access an open wifi, like in the above scenario, does the legality change if you repeat the signal so it is reachable from all portions of your house?

My thoughts: ask the neighbor's permission. Particularly if they're on a plan that charges ridiculous fees for excess usage, it can cause the neighbors a lot of headaches and even severe financial problems. Sure, they should have put a password on it, but not everyone's as clued up on how computers work as you might be. Taking something that you did not pay for withour the permission of the person who did pay for it is stealing. Stealing is wrong. The password reasoning is like saying it's ok to steal someone's jewelry or something because tey didn't buy a burglar alarm or store it in a safe, so they were practically inviting you to take it. Should they have been more careful? Probably. But that doesn't make it ok for you to take what itsn't yours. As for the legality, I imagine it's different everywhere.

Interesting thoughts....few comments: 'Round here, there is usually no cap on bandwidth with broadband. If a person broadcasts wifi with an open SSID, the router is acting as the representative for the owner. When the router grants access to the user, then, in proxy, that person is granting the guest access to the wifi. IMO, legally and otherwise, this is the exchange that is taking place when anyone connects to an open wifi connection. And comparing wifi to jewelry is a false comparison. When you take jewelry, the original owner loses possession. When you share wifi, there is no loss in possession. If anything the ISP is the one losing...but some ISP's prohibit it in their contract while others have no problem. And in the scenario I described, the ISP *isn't* losing a potential customer because the one doing the scarfing is not serviced by the ISP. I know in the United States, the laws are unclear....as discussed in the link I posted. Until there is legislative or judicial action, it will remain ambiguous. ...Oh, and this hypothetical scenario is based on a friend's situation. And in this scenario, so far there has been no way to identify who is sharing the wifi.

Hmm. The comparision is valid here because bandwidth IS capped and severely overcharged if you use too much (on most plans) and/or severely slowed down (on our plan it drops down to less-than dial-up speeds).

Yeah, as I recall, there has been no legislation or anything of the sort on the subject, so it's legal until something happens in that regard...in the US, anyways. I believe in the UK you can get fined for jacking someone's wifi.

How about a practical viewpoint? If you abuse it, it can go away. I intentionally left my wifi open, thinking i'd be cool with the neighbors.. one in particular had asked to use it, and i didn't mind.. but then one night i couldn't get any speed, and i see 4 devices that don't live here online right now, so I enabled WPA and locked them all out. The people not bothering to ask screwed it up for the ones that did. Yeah, just ask...

You could give the person who asked the password and they could continue using it. Just saying.

[b]larry229 wrote:[/b] [quote]You could give the person who asked the password and they could continue using it. Just saying.[/quote] That is exactly what I did. The "screwed it up for everbody" just meant anyone else who might have leeched with consideration didn't get the chance to prove that, anyone who WAS leeching with consideration was cut off due to no fault of their own, and my friend to whom I DID grant permission was without net access for almost a week until I could get him the password.