It's a cute-sounding name for something that can land you in trouble with the law.
Woke up today to the news in the papers that a 17 yr-old had been hauled to court for illegally accessing his neighbour's unsecured wireless network.
I'm not totally sure what's the law, but I find it funny that you can be prosecuted for acessing an unsecured wireless network. If the owner has chosen to make his wirless unsecured, then why is it wrong for someone to have access to his network? It's like... if I use a cheapo wireless microphone in my home to sing karaoke, and my neighbour's radio picks up the transmission, is he liable to be prosecuted? There are tools for a person to make his network secure if he doesn't want others to access it, and I think the onus should be left to the owner to use such tools. Furthermore, given that Singapore is going to become one big wireless hotspot, are we supposed to be worried everytime we connect to a wifi access point in public? Like at a shopping centre food court?
Like I said, I admit I'm not sure what's exactly in the law as the article in the Straits Times just states that what the boy did was illegal and nothing more. It just seems to me that this law is kinda funny.
1 comment:
Tomorrow has some discussion on this issue. Perhaps you can trackback there.
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