For as long as it is possible to hack the security on your router this will never happen. EDIT/ any way I was trying to get an example off sp4nky for his completely ridiculous examples, although I don't expect him to post again on this topic as he must know he is wrong.
if someone hacks your wireless security, you haven't aided and abetted if you willingly leave your wireless open then someone misuses it then potentialy you have aided and abetted.
That's not the case at all, or are you saying if I goto McDonalds and download some kiddie porn then McDonalds is aiding and abetting? And if you do indeed think that is the case then if I downloaded illegal content from my own house then Sky is aiding and abetting?
well sky have terms and conditions of service, and i bet in there somewhere it states you should not use it for illegal use, and if you did, you could be disconnected. i do believe you need to register for mcdonalds wifi, having not used it i don't know, but you cant bet there will be some limits to what you can do with it, as in most provide only certain services like http traffic a home users wifi is a whole different kettle of fish, with little limitation on available services.
We are going round in circles now, fact is to be charged with aiding and abetting you have to knowingly help/participate in a criminal act.* So you are wrong anyway mate. *Source - A Sergeant with Strathclyde Police (my mate)
This is really the better example to go with. Knives are not normal items to leave sitting around based on pure negligence. A gardening pitch fork is a perfectly normal item for people to live sitting out in the lawn, just like plenty of perfectly normal people leave their networks insecure. An item which is not percieved as potentially destructive or dangerous by the ower, just like wireless networks. The best way to check if what you're saying makes sense is to imagine an elderly woman as the subject in question. An elderly woman leaves her gardening pitch fork out in her lawn and it gets used in a violent crime. Is it really reasonable to say that she is aiding and abetting by leaving out what she percieves as a harmless gardening tool? She'd never imagine someone would use it in a violent crime! Replace the gardening tool with the wireless router used for illegal downloads. Replace it with a pillow used to smother someone. It quickly becomes completely unreasonable. Anything could be used for a crime, perception of what is likely to be used changes on a person to person basis unless the law specifically outlines them, such as with guns.
i often am, and don't mind admitting it, but really its upto the courts to decide and as no such case has been to court, it would have to be tested, in court, and then future prosecutions would be based on the test case. really what should happen is all wireless routers should be pre-configured with security, using random encryption keys, that can be changed by the end user if they so choose.
What really should happen is that the courts (and everyone else besides) realises that encryption can be cracked. In 8 minutes. Nothing is more vulnerable than a system that is assumed to be foolproof.
an aside... I once spent about a year on the internet using a router (WEP) I'd hacked. Then one day it just stopped working. I hacked another, but a few days later I'd found out that my neighbour had died about two weeks prior and lay there until the smell tipped off the police...I had been using a dead man's router. I felt a pang of guilt. A guilt only alleviated once I had come to the only logical moral conclusion I could - "Yeah, f**k BT! He hardly minded..."
theft of broadband services, wireless and telegraphy act, computer misuse act, any of these could be brought against a wireless hacker.
I personally do not believe that a member of the public will be held accountable should someone misuse their unsecured wireless network. I would imagine that there is more likely to be legislation that calls for all wireless routers to be supplie with security features enabled.
There will be no laws and no legal accountability for the WiFi owner. The reasons being: 1. It is not something politicians understand and it does not affect big business, so they don't care. 2. Making the public accountable for something they barely understand its use of is political suicide. 3. It is impossible to adequately police and enforce such laws.
they'd need to hire a competent infosec expert to show that any wireless connection, even aes is crackable on I'd say (lemme pull a number out of my ass) 70% of connections due to bad passwords.. why places don't run wireless once demonstrated, the lawyers would look silly to try and push this any further.. even hidden ssid and mac filters are nothing but annoyances and wep.. really.. if a company still issues wep as security, they got issues.. a drag queen can break wep.. but from what I've seen there's enough to go around.. seems those 2wire routers you see all over town are wep protected and it makes me wonder as those are offered from at&t, or are they setup by people who just don't know any better.. they see a long 104 bit wep key and think it's more secure you can run a billion word dictionary attack against any wpa/wpa2 wireless connection after capturing the handshake, bring it home and in 5 hours with just a ati 5850- see if you swatted a mosquito like zed.. then people usually use that same password for everything- so it snowballs from there.. even if they use different passwords for everything, once in the lan you can do a whole lot of shenanigans or even brute force the 8 character pass if the lists you use haven't caught it (as most people tend to make 8 character passwords as that's the minimum length wpa/wpa2 allows) or if your a green goblin.. 11 hours with a 460 and forget crunching the 8.. yeah nvidia fails but try telling it to the hoards if a judge seen this in action.. you could even demonstrate this very easily by simply using a password in a small dictionary and using that as a demonstration right from a laptop.. another scenario.. what if you wanted to frame someone and had access to their machine.. it's like that episode of the next generation when the ferengi tried to frame picard by fabricating his voice to make him say he shot an unarmed vessel with the stargazer.. yeah there are ferengi out there in our society you can see all the possibilities.. now the isps could stop you from downloading if policed on that level.. but that's another topic I really don't like all the bitorrent sites out there, they make it too easy.. like waving a steak in front of a dog.. of course he's going to tear it up is that surprising? yeah if your a lawyer and have something to gain from it
