Open tap?

Wi-Fi cloaks a new breed of intruder - says the St. Petersburg Times of Florida. What's the beef? Well, it seems that local police in Florida have arrested a man for logging onto an open (but private) WiFi router. Their reasoning is that he accessed the network without permission and by doing so hacked the network.

I fear that we're looking at a new and important paradigm challenge again. The question that needs to be decided upon is who is responsible for individual's careless use of their own resources. Is an open WiFi point like an open faucet just inside your garden or is it an open house door? The essence is that if we choose the faucet paradigm, we agree that the casual 'intruder' is not taking away anything, isn't causing harm to the owner of the faucet. If we choose the open door paradigm, we presume that the casual 'intruder' is malevolent and is abusing the good faith of the house owner, making use of something not intended for public use.

My instinct is that an open WiFi access point is an open faucet. If you discount the claims of open WiFi routers being used by the world's most nepharious, in an age where many of the fixed line connections feeding the WiFi routers come on an 'eat all you can' bandwidth plan, a casual user of an access point does not cause any damage to the person who leaves their access point open.