Word: fi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When I moved into my apartment three years ago, the first thing I did after I tipped the movers was sit down on a box, crack open my laptop and sniff the air for wi-fi signals. And I found them: my apartment was chock-full of delicious, invisible data, ripe for the plucking. You couldn't say I made a conscious decision at that exact moment to become a criminal. But it definitely got a lot harder not to be a criminal...
...unsecured wireless networks of my neighbors. This didn't seem illegal at the time--I mean, those signals were streaming through my apartment--but it is an actual, bona fide crime. Last year a man in Cedar Springs, Mich., was fined $400 for mooching off somebody else's wi-fi--a police officer spotted him laptop-surfing in a parked car. Apparently that violates Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 47 of the United States Code, which covers anybody who "intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access." Whatever that means--the law was passed in 1986, back when...
...leaving your network open can put your personal data at risk--but I didn't want their data; I wanted their bandwidth! If it was so precious to them, they should have put a password on it! Don't look at me like that--according to the Wi-Fi Alliance, 53% of people surveyed said they'd done the same thing...
Mine wasn't a particularly sociable apartment building, but wi-fi transcends urban alienation. You can draw your blinds and grunt at me on the stairs all you want, No. 7, but I can see your network just fine. Some people thought of creative names for their networks: ParisBrooklyn, MessageInaBottle. Some were boring: linksys, NETGEAR, default. I was always happy to see the boring ones, because the people who don't bother thinking of clever names for their home networks are the same people who don't bother to password-protect them. Anybody who calls his hot spot WebOfDarkness...
...first class when you're stealing bandwidth. Wi-fi hot spots are large--about the size of a football field--but those signals had to pass through a lot of masonry before they got to my laptop. Wi-fi operates on an unlicensed frequency, so it has to deal with interference from baby monitors and microwave ovens and cordless phones too. As a result, my Internet access would vanish and reappear like a will-o'-the-wisp, even when I engaged OS X's excitingly named "interference robustness" feature. I always seemed to lose connectivity just when I was about...