I don’t know how many times I’ve mooched broadband off unsecured access points. Maybe I should stop…
A Vancouver, Wash. coffee shop tired of seeing a 20-year-old man mooch off their free wireless Internet access called the police, who charged him with “theft of services.”
Brewed Awakenings employees dialed 911 after Alexander Eric Smith of Battle Ground, Wash. piggybacked off the shop’s wireless Internet service for more than three months.
Speaking of free WiFi, the access point I was setting up at my office is now live (it was live last Friday, so it could be up and running before the Pacific Crest Triathlon and sports festival that has taken over Sunriver the last few days). It covers a good chunk of the Southern part of the Village Mall. I took some of what I learned from responses to a previous post and built it into a good functionl access point. Our antenna is up on the top of the mall by the Coldwell Banker office, but there’s a signal at El Pescador, Dave (not a very strong one — I’m working on that). So if any of you are in Sunriver, feel free to hook up to it — I promise not to sue you or have you arrested if you mooch (we have bandwidth and content filter and proxies so bandwidth usage is minimal and it’s on a separate DSL line from our office T1, so we don’t care what you do with it).
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Woo hoo! I’ll try it out next time I’m in Sunriver. (Hopefully after the triathlon, which is trying the traffic.) 🙂
Yeah, the triathlon was a mess — but that was my reasoning for hooking it up as the companies I work for sponsor the event.
I wrote about that a few days ago. Unfortunately, I predict the focus will be more on the fact that he was a registered sex offender than on the fact they left their wi-fi “open”. If they didn’t want people outside the shop using it, then they should have tightened it up.
Aside from that there are many, many hotels anymore that offer “wide open wi-fi”, so he could have just sat outside one of them.