Andrew Cherry - The Cherry Pit ... 'cuz life's like a bowl of cherries?

A man in London was arrested for using his Wifi enabled Skype phone on an open Wifi access point. Police actually stopped him when they observed him using his laptop in a public area and busted him!!! Reported here is the article on ZDNet, apparently this is not the first time this has occurred.

Citing the Computer Misuse Act and the Communications Act, apparently piggybacking on open hotspots is a no-no. I guess I'm guilty as charge. I don't jump on public access points all that often, but it just so happens that I did that just last evening. I was hanging out killing time at Future Shop while waiting for someone and since the store was closing, I headed next door to the local Starbucks ( I can't believe I just called Starbucks a *local* establishment), flipped the lid on my laptop and started browsing around to get some specs on a couple things I saw at Future Shop to verify their Linux suitability.

Of course, Starbucks has an account with a Wifi Hotspot provider (Bell Mobility I believe) which is ridiculously expensive and a bit excessive for Starbucks to do to cyphon yet more money from their customers. My Wifi card of course picked up at least 10 access points immediately and although I didn't run my stumbler, I'm confident it would have found many more had I done so.

So, I connected to an access point (BBHotspot or something) and began doing my thing when I found out when I did an nslookup that the DNS responder was Future Shops. I guess I had jumped on to their network since it was so close.

Now here's my big question: Future Shop, being a large retailer of computer, networking and other IT and electronics equipment who would without a doubt have all the knowledge facilities available them to set up encryption and security on their WLAN, consciously decided to not to set it up. Was I *stealing* anything from them? Did I obtain unauthorized access to their network? Did I break in their network?

Funny thing just occurred to me, I was using a laptop that I had previously purchased from Future Shop, which had gone out within it's intended operating functionality and dutifully found available networks to connect to and asked me if I wanted to connect to it (it's only coincidental in this case that I hadn't configured it to automatically connect to available networks). Normal operating procedures for the computer and the network card. This particular situation is in itself an interesting coincidence that connect a number of facts together, but not in any way contrived.