[TriLUG] Wireless at Lowes

[z]

The whole reason I asked the question in the first place, is that I discovered 
that the 20yr old student next door was using my wireless access point to 
connect to the internet. I kept seeing activity on the access point when none 
of our machines were powered on. So I  looked at the DHCP table on the access 
point and found a computer with a NC State computer ID as the computer name. 
I knew the kid was a student there - bingo! 

At the time I scanned for other SSID's and found none, the next day I found 
his, so it wasn't that he had set his access point not to broadcast.

When I approached his mother about it, she blew me off, so I confronted him 
directly and, at first, he denied it. This ticked me off! I was a prank 
playing teenager once, but I always fessed up when confronted, apologized, 
and was done with it. As it turns out, his access point, when turned on, was 
connected to a modem, and he was using my cable bandwith to get better 
download times.

So, I changed my SSID and stopped broadcasting it, disabled DHCP, and put into 
place a MAC address filter to only allow those that I know of. I haven't 
bothered to investigate WEP, but maybe someday.

The irony of my ire is that if he had ASKED me if he could attach to my access 
point for general web and email, I probably would have said ok.

> >>> z [zzd at contentdb.net] wrote:
> >>>> Curious, is it legal to attach to any wireless network that does not
> >>>> have
> >>>> security provisions in place? e.g Attaching to your neighbors access
> >>>> point
> >>>> for faster than modem downloads, or sitting in the parking lot
> >>>> outside an
> >>>> office block?