Kittennet, upsidedownnet, blurrynet

[babysimon]

This guy was annoyed at his neighbours for stealing his WiFi. Solution: divide the network in half, do weird things to traffic from unknown MAC addresses...

(via Boing Boing)

Comments

[booklectica]

I keep wondering this: is stealing WiFi actually stealing? I mean, does it deprive the owner of anything?

[babysimon]

Does it deprive the owner of anything?

It might. Some people have low transfer limits on their broadband and pay extra if they go over. Other people might be wanting all their bandwidth for themselves.

Many people run insecure protocols like SMB (aka Windows networking) or uPNP (streaming audio / video) over their networks - I would be very uncomfortable having a stranger on my network for that reason.

You could certainly argue that you should secure your network, but that rings a bit hollow for me. I can easily set up WPA, but I shouldn't expect my granny to. Although maybe I should expect wireless routers to ship in a secure-by-default mode.

Someone's been prosecuted for in the UK for this - they were done for dishonestly obtaining an electronic communications service.