News Piggybacking teenager faces jail

Hey Pazu,

Would you say this climate is widely supported by the citizens of SIngapore or is it inflicted upon them. Is it changing?

The reason I ask is that that I have a hard time wrapping my brain around the concept of choosing collectivism and conformity and so I'm wondering what the reality is.

 

Where? (genuinely curious)

Not in my country, that's for certain...

 

US (where else )

Of course, here's a similar case from the UK

And one from Detroit

A related one from Marlyand To quote the article..

And another from Maryland

Anyway, that's just a few minutes on Google.

 

Scary...

 

Seems a bit excessive to be jailed for using the neighbours internet.
How it was used is important though.

Surfing for kiddie porn > P2P > just checking emails IMO.

If I were the neighbour I doubt I'd care if someone was just checking their emails and doing a little surfing.

On the other hand, if they were downloading kiddie porn using my connection (so any traced traffic came to my router and I was likely to be held responsible) then I'd be pissed.

Regardless of what he was using his neighbours connection for its still stealing.
Though bandwidth isn't something you can touch we still pay for a certain amount and his neighbour was in effect 'stealing' it.

The analogies of leaving your car/house unlocked don't do anything but add weight to the neighbour's argument.

Yes, if I left my house unlocked I wouldn't be surprised to find all my stuff missing when I got home.
Does that mean I gave permission, either express or implied, to take my stuff? No.
Does that mean the person who took all my stuff isn't a theif? No.
If your stuff was stolen from your house, would you seek recourse against the theif? Probably.

The punishment needs to fit the crime however.
I doubt the neighbour was that bothered by the amount that was stolen from him, more that fact that anything was taken at all.
And if he was that bothered by the threat of something being stolen, why not secure his network?
Ignorance is no excuse tbh.

 

I dunno. I'm fully wired here at home, but if I had a wireless gateway I think I'd look for a way to leave it open while at the same time securing the computers on my network from access through the gateway. After all, I pay a fixed amount for the bandwidth. It doesn't cost me any extra to share it and it's highly unlikley that other people using my pipe would affect my throughput.

Basically, if it doesn't cost anything to share, why not share?

 

Well, I would say that the general population is rather ill-informed of this oppressiveness. Even if such things are not welcomed amongst the general population, there is an climate of fear not unlike those in the film, V for Vendetta.

Anyway, relating to this news, I just heard from my friend still in Singapore a bit more detail. Turns out that this teen kinda deserved it. Because instead of accidentally discovered a unsecured wireless network in the comfort of his home. He actually sought out such free network dead in the middle of the night (3am, I heard) and was promptly arrested when someone spotted his suspicious behavior. God knows what was his intend. He could easily very well have malicious purposes rather than just surfing the web.

But word has it that he won't be serving a jail term because he will face early conscription and some probation instead of jail.

 

For me and so many others the geek rule of thumb when it comes to Wireless is this: if it's open and it's unsecured it's assumed public and free for neighborhood access (under the condition that all your web activity is legal) unless it is running a web-based authorization sytem (commonly used in major companies, colleges/universities) and the occasional DIY geek. If they don't want it to be public, they have options.

Call it rude and a little intrusive, but that's today's realilty. And the jail sentance is absolutly uneccesary and blown way out of proportions! If he was doing P2P or CP that's one thing, but if he was just surfing that doesn't excuse a jail sentance.

 

this reminds me of when vhs came out. all the broadcast stations and cable co's and hollywood were up in arms about people stealing content by recording onto vcr's. but it was deemed that if you broadcast a signal into someones home they had fair use to that signal. same with wifi. if you broadcast your network to everyone, it should be understood that you intend to share it. so as long as you don't use it for malicious purposes like illegal pron and copyright violation, you shouldn't get in trouble for using broadcast wifi, fm, dvb or whatever. My apartments cable access is a horrible mess of crappy patched wires and splitters, so my cable modem goes down often; I will then just use one of the 5 to 10 freakin open wifi connections my neighbors are using because its all through the same main cable connection for the building anyway.

 

I say beware fo the balck hoods! Its going that way I see unless you live in germany in a rural area LOL ha ha. or Russia!

 

Dare I say there's got to be more to that story that meet the eye. Think about it:

How did he get caught?

Even if finding that someone is connected to your router takes a second, if the people in question were so computer-illiterate they had the router wide open, it simply doesn't make sense (since they probably never looked at their router settings in the first place).

Even if somehow they did realize someone was using the connection: Maybe a family friend noticed it. Even then why wouldn't the friend just close the security hole and leave it at that?

Even if , say they were really angered and wanted to find the piggybacker. How? Do you know how difficult it is to triangulate someone wifi connection? I once had wifi connectivity issue in my office - trust me it wasn't easy to locate the source even with expensive professional equipment and knowledge.

Even if somehow the police got involved early on to locate the source - can you really imagine that happening? "999: 'oh, excuse me officer, someone is piggybacking my connection!' - 'No worries! SWAT is on its way'" - yeah right! Do you know how important a online crime must be before police starts doing something about it? Even the Singaporean police?

IT DOESN'T ADD UP PEOPLE. There's always more to those incredible stories we read around. Don't be fooled so easily. The guy could have been part of a much bigger investigation and they nailed him on whatever they could, or maybe the material downloaded was child porn, or maybe the guy was hacking into something serious, or maybe using the neighbour online identity, or maybe making threats - you know 'I can see what you type now give me your money' kinda thing.

k?

 

thats funny considering that people in America do it all the time....
whats it called again......wardriving........

 

Sometimes I look at this world and think it's going mad. This is one of those times.

I've got a wireless network that I hadn't got round to securing. Someone used it, I booted them and secured it. No biggy. Don't see what the issue is.

 

I agree with the sentiment and I would be the same BUT

1) them surfing while I'm playing CSS and getting crap pings would piss me off.
2) Having the open WLAN is begging for ARP Spoofing attacks.

Basically, I don't think there's any way to have an open and unsecured wifi without putting yourself at risk unless you use several routers...