We have a neighborhood wireless and wired LAN. We've learned the hard way that if you cannot identify the person on your network, you don't want them on the system. Too many problems chasing down well meaning abusers and complete idiots. Sure, here's the password has proven to be an invitation to weekend and evening troubleshooting exercises.
No, I haven't been reading the entire thread. Normally, I'm not interested in such discussions. However, when you tried to justify your theft, I thought it time to get involved.
So, you pay at other places. That doesn't have anything to do with the current theft of service situation. If I contribute to my favorite charity, that does not give me the excuse to do something else that's evil. One right does not negate a wrong.
I appreciate your good intentions. If the coffee shop had some way of enforcing those intentions, I wouldn't have a problem. We have a sorta free WLAN in one of the nearby towns that offers two levels of service. 128Kbits/sec for free, and full speed (about 1Mbit/sec) for those that pay. The slow speed is enough to check your email and do some light browsing, but not enough to do any major downloading or filesharing. If the coffee shop had such an arrangement to restrict abusers, I would have no problem.
How would you know how they're using it? Monitoring? Pretty MRTG graphs? logins and passwords? Those would work, but would you do it?
Trust but verify.
Full time. Some of my customers are in office complexes that are occupied by very small businesses. The occupants are often not in the office long enough to justify a broadband connection. So, they try to arrange for connectivity with the neighbors. Most often it's wireless. My guess is that I've gotten involved in about 40 such arrangments (not counting my own office complex) since about Jan 2000. I would say that about 5 of them were successful. About 5 were nightmares of one sort or other. The remaining 30 just didn't want to take the chance of having some stranger on their LAN. It's not a huge number, but it's fairly common.
I've also instigating sharing where I thought it made sense. For example my office complex has 5 companies with about 25 computers total on one DSL line. The security is maintained by having 5 seperate IP addresses, 5 seperate ethernet routers, and 3 seperate wireless access points. Because the routers are independent, nobody can sniff or see anyone elses traffic. That works well.
I've also thrown together similar arrangements using a single IP address but multiple non-routeable networks for the different companies. Mostly, I use Freesco:
What doesn't work is piling everyone on a single LAN where everyone can see everyone elses computer (or sometimes their traffic).
No, it's quite simple. My job is to keep the phone from ringing. If there are complaints or problems, I'm not doing my job. If that means preventing problems before they happen, I'll do it.
Well, think of all the things that can go wrong with your shared connection and ask yourself:
- How would you react if something went wrong?
- How will you find the culprit?
- What will you do to prevent it from happening again? I do that every day for customers. They pay me to prevent problems. That makes me a bit more conservative than most. The good news is that I sleep nights. Back in the bad old dot com days (1995-2000), the phone would ring at all hours of the night. I eventually figured out that it was better to prevent problems than to constantly fix them.
Sure, that's what one of my neighbors said. It was true for about 6 months until their son dribbles home from college during Christmas break. He brings his trojan infest laptop home, plants it on the neighborhood WLAN, and proceeds to spew spam out to the internet. I get my IP address black listed for about a week. Estimated wasted time was about 8 hours including cleaning out his laptop. Some of my friends and competitors have similar horror stories.
The coffee shop owner and I have no reason to trust your good intentions. As I said, If they had the means to enforce your good intentions, I wouldn't have much of a problem. As it stands, your ability to abuse their bandwidth and affect their customers is a problem.
No, not like you. You seem to have a problem with stealing. The basics are "Thou shalt not steal". There's no exemption for things of little value, or indulgences for doing good deeds. Anything less is rationalizing your actions. At least I have a concience.
That's why I wanted you to check with someone else for a clue about ethics and theft of service. I make no claim to be pure and virtuous. I've done far more than just check for access.
Well, if that's true, and I have my doubts, then I've misjudged the coffee shop owner. I maintain a few coffee shop wireless systems and none of the owners would react in that manner to any form of wireless hacking. Most would throw you out and suggest you never return.
We have a local coffee shop that has intentionally turned down the power on their access point to limit access only to their paying customers. I'm also working on a scheme to measure the range of a client radio from the access point and use that information to allow or deny access. It's too expensive at this time, but if I can get the price down, I'm sure the coffee shops will most likely be the initial customers.