The way I feel about it is the person who decides to broadcast an unsecured network is, in most cases, breaching their own TOS with their ISP. If they do such a thing, the person that logs on to that network should not be held responsible. In many cases my laptop would just logon to an unsecured wireless network.
Originally posted by from a blog @ http://life.firelace.com/archives/wireless/wifi/index.php:
Then Mr. Crume says one of the most generalized things known in security field:
As for security issues, the bottom line is that you should not connect to any network that "you don't personally control or can't be sure is trustworthy unless you are willing to assume that everything you see at your end of the connection could be seen by others," Crume advises.
Hello? Anyone home? Every network in the world is not controlled at the end-user. If you want to use the Internet, there is the chance that your cable company is sniffing your modem, a hacker is sitting at the node-router sniffing the network, and so on, so forth. Even applied to WiFi, his argument lies invalid since even if you own the WiFi hotspot, there is nothing that says a hacker can't still sniff the network. Wireless feeds mean that the laptop generates a signal and broadcasts to whatever range its little antenna can handle. Then hopefully, some antenna from the user-owned hotspot picks it up and decrypts the messages and sends it off to the wild blue yonder of the Internet. There is nothing stopping anyone from sniffing the airwaves (unless you think WEP/WPA actually does something). There is a reason behind Netstumbler, Kismet, and other wireless sniffing tools. The pairing of Kismet and Ethereal allows any hacker to read wireless packets if they are not encrypted.
