{"id":134,"date":"2004-10-04T17:14:31","date_gmt":"2004-10-04T21:14:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scaredpoet.com\/wordpress\/?p=134"},"modified":"2004-10-04T17:16:45","modified_gmt":"2004-10-04T21:16:45","slug":"theft-of-signal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/?p=134","title":{"rendered":"Theft of Signal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s an interesting article<\/a> from a fellow blogger about his travails with a friendly neighborhood police officer about his “stealing” a wi-fi connection from a public library.<\/p>\n

Very interesting now that police officers – some of which may be savvy of these things, but probably quite a few who aren’t – are now patrolling for random people with open laptops. My questions:<\/p>\n

1. How did the cop know the person was using WiFi? And what’s more, how does he know which<\/em> WiFi signal he was using?<\/p>\n

2. Being a public library, wasn’t the signal available for the use of – look out now – the general public<\/em>? If not, why not? And if the signal was for public use (which I suspect it was), what exactly is the difference if that public person was using the signal inside or outside of the building? <\/p>\n

3. So he stopped using the connection, and the officer told him to put the computer away anyway. Since when was there a law against using a computer outside?<\/p>\n

4. To totally put a wrench in things, I wonder how this same cop would’ve reacted if I had my setup<\/a> out there. Considering I’d be online but not using any<\/strong><\/em>wireless connection at all (the connection would be 1xRTT over CDMA… basically using the cellular network like I normally do when no WiFi connection is available). I doubt whatever shaky ground he was on would’ve been far shakier in such a case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People are being harrassed outside of libraries for using their WAN signal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gadgets-widgits-and-whatzits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}