The Security Mentor

Some debates simply go on forever. Catholicism or Protestantism? Hang toilet paper coming off the front of the roll or the back of the roll?

One of those debates is whether it's ethical to use the Internet through someone else's wireless connection. Recent entries in the debate include the New York Times approving of WiFi freeloading and networking publication Networking Pipeline calling it "bandwidth theft".

People usually try to argue this by analogy. That gets hilarious when people try to find analogies from the physical world that actually match the realities of how WiFi works. My favorite compared a wireless access point to a garden sprinkler! Then people get truly worked up over their positions while ignoring simple and common-sense solutions. At least the two articles linked above mention some of those common-sense solutions.

What would the Bedu do?

A well in a desert is something you want to protect. On the other hand, people need to travel sometimes, which means they need some way to drink while they're on the road. The Bedouin evolved a custom to meet the needs of travelers and of well owners. Travelers could stop at someone else's well and drink enough for the next stage of their journey. If you went beyond "reasonable" consumption, for example by trying to water your sheep at someone else's well -- that would bring a violent response. The unwritten rule was to allow small and occasional use.

One theory of WiFi ethics is similar. Checking email is like filling your canteen, downloading TV episodes is like bringing your entire flock of sheep.

The stick in the doorway

I don't know whether this is true. I read it in a well-researched work of fiction.

Supposedly, some orderly Central American civilization did not have locks on their doors. If you wanted people to stay out you grabbed a stick and leaned it against the outside of the doorway. The stick didn't block the door. It was just a "keep out" sign. Everyone respected it.

On this theory, turning on the flimsy security features of a wireless access point is like putting the stick in your doorway. It doesn't prevent access and isn't meant to. It's simply a way of saying "I choose not to share this connection". No stick means "come on in".

The problem with both ideas about sharing

Two dangerous hidden assumptions lurk inside the pro-leeching arguments. One is that you have no impact on the connection's owner when you hop on. The other is that you can somehow discern the owner's intent from the settings on the access point.

Check your email, look at some headlines, and you won't use enough of your neighbor's bandwidth to matter. But you will be on your neighbor's home network. Your neighbor may be sharing directories with other machines on the same network, on the assumption that all of them belong to him. Now you've put yourself in the position of compromising your neighbor's privacy. Worse, if you've picked up a virus you could give it to your neighbor.

Privacy and security aren't the only problems. You're perfectly law-abiding, of course, but if someone else connects to your neighbor's access point and does something illegal with it, the trail leads to your neighbor. Your neighbor may not want that kind of exposure.

You can't tell what your neighbor wants at all, because in almost all cases the wireless network is set up just the way it came out of the box. The wireless network may be open, but that doesn't tell you that your neighbor meant for it to be open.

The low-tech solution.

Knock on the door and ask, maybe?

MORE, 3/10/2006

Is it legal to use someone's Wi-Fi connection to browse the Web if they haven't put a password on it?
Nobody really knows. "It's a totally open question in the law," says Neal Katyal, a professor of criminal law at Georgetown University.

But if you raise enough suspicion, you can get arrested.

UPDATE 3/24:

In Illinois, you can be convicted for "unauthorized use" of a WiFi signal. The newspaper article about that case starts out with, you guessed it, a bad analogy.