p2pnet - rss feed: $400 fine for WiFi piggyback
p2pnet.net news:- Sam Peterson II, from Cedar Springs, Michigan, has been fined $400 and ordered to perform 40 hours of community service for tapping a coffee shop WiFi connection.
The Re-Union Street Café offers net access for customers and, “I just went down and checked my e-mail and didn’t see a problem with that,” Wood 8, Peterson’s local TV station, has him saying.
But Peterson did it everyday, “and from his car,” says the story. “He drove up, parked, and piggybacked onto the Union Street network.”
That’s when he caught the eagle eye of Sparta police chief Andrew Milanowski
“I had a feeling a law was being broken,” Wood 8 has him saying, “but I didn’t know exactly what.”
He found a “relatively new and rarely used law,” to wit, ‘unauthorized use of computer access’.
Milanowski didn’t believe Peterson knew he was breaking the law, says the item, which also quotes him as saying, “In my opinion, probably not. Most people probably don’t.”
It also has Re-Union Street Café owner Donna May stating, “I didn’t know it was really illegal, either. If he would have come in (to the coffee shop) it would have been fine.”
“I think a lot of people should be shocked, because quite honestly, I still don’t understand it myself,” Peterson told FOXNews.com. “I do not understand how this is illegal.”
Also See:
Wood 8 - A wireless felony, May 22, 2007
FOXNews.com - Michigan Man Fined for Using Coffee Shop’s Wi-Fi Network, June 5, 2007
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile - http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php | | And use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site
Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
June 8th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
The way I see this: If he is inside the store, then signal-access is permitted. If he is not inside the store, then access is not permitted.
I wonder if tired-out souls, who are occasionally known to taking their laptops into the facilities (in The States, “bathroom”), are considered to be “in the (legal environs of the) store. $400 fine!!
Mr. Peterson should take his case to The U.S. Supreme Court.
June 8th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
What really bothers me is this mentality of
“I had a feeling a law was being broken,” …”but I didn’t know exactly what.”
This is really stupid. A man is sitting in his car using his computer, and he is guilty of “something”?
He accessed the network in broad daylight, and he was connected to an open wireless. Which makes one wonder what will happen if more and more people strt using the FON WiFi routers and share their networks.
Will people using these networks also be arrested for “maybe breaking the law”?
These Gestappo-like tactics by porlice, military and Government is going overboard.
Just my two cents
June 8th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
If he’d popped in to the shop to check his horoscope in the paper, the shop would probably let him off with a curt “hey, don’t you think you should buy a coffee once in a while?”. Even if he’d actually stolen a packet of sugar every day, they probably wouldn’t have called the police. Yet this alleged crime is similar in nature, and amounted to “theft” of far, far less than the cost of that hypothetical packet of sugar.
To be fair to the cop though, he probably doesn’t realise what an immensely trivial operation checking your email is. I’ve got to wonder too, if that “crime” had a side-serving of traffic hazard, and this was an excuse.
June 8th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
The way I see it is this: If you run a Wifi Network and DON’T have security on it (wep, wpa, etc) Then you are really saying, “free unrestricted wifi, come and get it.”
June 9th, 2007 at 11:04 pm
That’s the de facto standard in the now-wireless-aware age. Everyone who has a wireless network generally KNOWS that “wireless security” exists, and that it needs to be set up. The books with the router tells you that you should set it up. You’d have to be pretty out of touch AND fail to read the instructions to “unknowingly” operate an open wireless access point these days. Look, when I have 70-year-olds that don’t know much at all about the computer asking me if I will be sure to turn on the security on the router, I think it’s fairly safe to say that it’s common knowledge at this point.
June 9th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
If I was the man, I would have fought the crap out of it in court. “They run an open access point, and if they don’t want just anyone to be able to get on it, they know that they can turn on the wireless security. They left the wireless wide open, and I didn’t cause any harm to the company nor did I put enough stress on their equipment to reduce the quality of service for others. A publicly accessible wireless access point is no different than a set of publicly accessible kiosks outside a store–it is out in the open, ready for public use. They chose to not make it private, and if they feel that I have damaged them, it is their responsibility to sue me for it. The State doesn’t have a law explicitly preventing me from using a network resource that is wide open to the public, either, so it isn’t the State’s job to prosecute me either.”
June 12th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
This guy shouldn’t have been using public Wi-Fi for something as private as e-mail access in the first place. Along with making the connection accessible to anyone, the lack of wireless security means that your transmissions are in the clear. Someone else in that coffee shop could have easily intercepted his e-mail messages and read them. It is for this reason that I refuse to use my campus’ wireless network. Sure, I’m required to log in with a Web portal first, but the connection itself is unencrypted and can easily be seen by eavesdroppers.
August 17th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
wow, that state is really weird!
it is so easy to just log into unprotected wifi anywhere, there may be 4 shops with with wifi close by, all open to anyone, but to actually use one you must go to that shop, how bizzare. dont most commercial enterprises know about wifi protection, if its an open connection why is it illegal to use it?
August 18th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
Don’t be ignorant, you all just want an excuse to get away with free access.
It’s blatant common sense, it said, for customers.
If you don’t go in, you apparently are not a customer. Therefore the access is not there for you.