What percentage of open access points do you believe are intentionally open, as an invitation? While it's always a possibility that an open AP is intended as an invitation, I'd argue that this likelihood is quite small, and thus it is not the correct assumption to make.
It is no different from the car with the keys inside. Based on our understanding of our "societal norms", we understand that the probability that somebody has provided this car for public use is quite small, so while it is possible that the owner has this intent, we cannot use this possibility to justify an assumption, given the low probability of that assumption being correct.
What percentage? You're right, it's probably significantly less than 50%. But it's also a heckuva lot more than the percentage of cars with their keys left in them for the purpose of being used. And as I say, there's no way of knowing for certain whether an AP is open on purpose or not, and the likelihood of it being free is much, much higher than the analogy of the car.
A better analogy: Say you're walking down the street, and you happen across a stack of brochures or coupons or the like sitting outside the door of a convenience store. There's no way of knowing if somebody left that stack there to be taken freely by people, or if maybe a delivery guy just left them there for a minute while inside. It's the inverse of the car example: Certainly most things like that are there for the purpose of being taken. But how can you be sure? Applying the same logic you apply to APs, lacking something specifically denoting them as free, one must assume they're not, despite the fact that they're not locked in any way.
Another analogy is the bowl of candy on somebody's desk. Most of the time, people leave it there to share. But how can you tell for sure? You'd have to ask, and with wifi, that's next to impossible: Of the half-dozen or so APs visible from my apartment, usually 2 or 3 of them are open... But I don't have anyway of figuring out who they belong to and subsequently asking for permission.
Whether using somebody's access point without permission is a crime or not is a legal argument, and it doesn't seem like we're arguing specific laws in this conversation.
If, instead, what you mean is "it shouldn't be a crime", then I'd argue that it is easily justifiable as a crime. My internet access is a finite resource, I pay for that resource, and the cost to me is commensurate with the capacity. When you use that resource without permission, you're consuming some of that capacity, which can result in reduced availability of that resource for my usage. That sounds a lot like the premise of theft, to me.
-harry
Again, it all comes down to using one's own judgment. But, just as with the coupons or candy above, I just don't believe that using someone's open wifi amounts to a real crime. For me to
really commit theft, I have to have a reasonable belief that what I'm taking isn't being freely offered up for the taking. With open APs, that's virtually impossible.
And none of that is to even mention that a lot -- if not most -- people's PCs will
automatically connect to an open AP if it sees one. Surely you can't call it theft if I open up my laptop somewhere and it hops on your network automatically. Can you? If so, who's at fault then? Me for not more responsibly configuring my laptop to keep it from "stealing" Internet service? Or you, the AP administrator, for not more responsibly configuring their AP to keep it from inviting laptops to connect to it, literally inducing a "theft"?
Edit: I am trying to be a bit of a polemic/devil's advocate here, for sure. I can see calling it
a crime... just not a very serious one. Given the stuff I outlined above, and the fact that somebody can do it completely unwittingly, I just can't bring myself to consider it that egregious a transgression, even though I've rarely (if ever, that I recall... haven't every really had the need to) done it myself.
