Networking Pipeline disagrees with yesterday's NY Times piece by an ethicist, who suggests it's ok to freeload on your neighbor's Wi-Fi, provided you aren't consuming unfair amounts of bandwidth.

"He's wrong, on several counts. First of all, setting up encryption is not particularly easy, as anyone who has struggled through WPA can tell you. So you can't hold it against people that they haven't set up encryption on their networks. Secondly, using someone's Wi-Fi connection can hog their bandwidth. When someone pays for broadband service, they expect to get all the bandwidth they pay for. It's not right for a freeloader to use that bandwidth without permission."

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