Is using someone else’s unsecured wi-fi without their knowledge stealing? I
suppose it depends on your point of view. I think it’s not but the Law and
the unsuspecting owner of an unsecured wireless access point think it is.
Given the paucity of convictions
for piggy-backing on someone else’s connection, I think I’ll
continue to take the risk too. Despite that, I’m a hypocrite when it comes
to other people using mine. I have the security settings whacked up to the
maximum. No-one but the most determined hacker is going to have a share of
my bandwidth.
Like most regular travellers, when I know I have to connect to the internet –
to check my email or browse Times Online for news - I open my wireless
sniffer with trepidation. Will there be an unsecured access point in the
area I can piggyback on? Often my hopes are raised by a handful of access
points that appear to be unsecured. More often than not, these turn out to
be false hopes as connection after connection fails. Then with heavy heart,
I turn to the BT Openzones and T-Mobiles of this world and fish out my
credit card.
Yet one wireless connection that seems to crop up again and again and which
seems to do exactly what it says on the tin is "Free Public Wifi".
Virtually every business traveller looking for a free network to hook up to
will have come across this on their travels around the globe. But anyone who
has tried to connect to it will have been disappointed – the connection
invariably fails.
But these so-called Free Public Wifi networks are replicating like viruses.
The reason is because of a quirk in the way wireless connections work.
Wireless devices can work in two different modes – infrastructure mode
(where you connect via a hotspot or wireless router) and ad-hoc mode (where
two wireless-enabled devices connect directly with each other).
In both modes, an identifier known as the SSID is broadcast by the device
connected to the internet. Your laptop picks up this identifier to make the
connection. But due to a technical quirk, devices working in ad hoc mode
start broadcasting that same identifier even when the original
internet-connected device has long since moved out of range. It is this
identifier - Free Public Wifi - which appears in the list of available
networks when you sniff for a connection.
If someone else now comes along with a laptop looking to piggyback on a free
connection, they will see the same thing - a laptop (yours) announcing that
it is offering Free Public Wifi. Of course, your laptop doesn’t have a
connection to the internet, the connection fails and the new person’s laptop
starts broadcasting the same identifier when you move out of range. And so
the chain continues.
Looking back in time, this must have started somewhere. Somewhere out there is
(or was) a real ad hoc wireless network with the identifier Free Public
Wifi. Whoever connected to it in the early days of wireless set off a
virtual chain letter that now seems impossible to stop. It seems that Free
Public Wifi has become the Craig Shergold of the wireless world (whose name
I fear to mention lest it set off another avalanche of get well cards –
Google his name to see what I mean).
