I don't know if I agree with this situation..

I just read this on digg... I don't know if I agree with people who think that what this guy was doing was theft even in the sense that piracy can be considered theft. If it was a private residence that he was connecting to their WIFI it would be a different story and those people should have passwords on their wifi routers. However, In this case I would agree that a private person's wifi connection isn't meant for public use but the Public Libraries was.

But these people shouldn't be able to fall back on the analogy that they think it's like leaving a door unlocked and saying even if its unlocked that doesn't mean you can go into the building and do whatever you want. Why? Because WiFi like this is nothing like a building since you don't have any doors or areas you have to enter in order to use it. It's not even like stealing property from someones front yard because this implies that there won't be any bandwidth leftover.

No one else is even making use of the bandwidth at night so in all honesty it's typically going to waste. It's not like someone like this using the internet at night means less bandwidth for people in the morning. If anything it's like taking rain water from buckets attached to gutters at a public building in a way that there still is lots of water left for people the next day. Or using a street light outside of the libary to read your books after hours. Or like the library kept stacks of weatherproof books out in the parking lot and then got mad when someone was reading them after hours when no one else was but not taking them with him so he could then come back and read them again.

The library should shut off their router at night and then there wouldn't be any temptation for people to use their internet connection after hours. One person mentioned using a 10 dollar timer on the router and that sounds about right to me.

I guess this guy had been going around connecting to any and every unprotected wifi source that he could public or private perhaps living in people's parking lots until they chased him away so he got on the cops bad side already. But I still think part of the blame should be on the people operating unprotected open wifi hotspots.

The worst thing that someone could say about what the peson was doing was he was loitering outside the library.

I don't know if I agree with this situation..

I just read this on digg... I don't know if I agree with people who think that what this guy was doing was theft even in the sense that piracy can be considered theft. If it was a private residence that he was connecting to their WIFI it would be a different story and those people should have passwords on their wifi routers. However, In this case I would agree that a private person's wifi connection isn't meant for public use but the Public Libraries was.

But these people shouldn't be able to fall back on the analogy that they think it's like leaving a door unlocked and saying even if its unlocked that doesn't mean you can go into the building and do whatever you want. Why? Because WiFi like this is nothing like a building since you don't have any doors or areas you have to enter in order to use it. It's not even like stealing property from someones front yard because this implies that there won't be any bandwidth leftover.

No one else is even making use of the bandwidth at night so in all honesty it's typically going to waste. It's not like someone like this using the internet at night means less bandwidth for people in the morning. If anything it's like taking rain water from buckets attached to gutters at a public building in a way that there still is lots of water left for people the next day. Or using a street light outside of the libary to read your books after hours. Or like the library kept stacks of weatherproof books out in the parking lot and then got mad when someone was reading them after hours when no one else was but not taking them with him so he could then come back and read them again.

The library should shut off their router at night and then there wouldn't be any temptation for people to use their internet connection after hours. One person mentioned using a 10 dollar timer on the router and that sounds about right to me.

I guess this guy had been going around connecting to any and every unprotected wifi source that he could public or private perhaps living in people's parking lots until they chased him away so he got on the cops bad side already. But I still think part of the blame should be on the people operating unprotected open wifi hotspots.

The worst thing that someone could say about what the peson was doing was he was loitering outside the library.