Comment by wzdd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wzdd | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the riddle at all. The neighbour "cast light out onto the street and in to the windows of the neighbouring houses". In a very real and obvious sense, the neighbour's light is no longer theirs at that point. Even by the naive definition of stealing ("taking something which doesn't belong to you"), the Reader is not stealing.

By contrast, Wifi bandwidth, Internet access, electricity, and so on, are limited resources which someone has to pay for. If the Reader connected their Kindle to their neighbour's power supply then they are unambigously stealing electricity. Viewed in this way, an employer requiring their employee to consume electricity, potentially deprive other users of their home Internet of wifi bandwidth, and so on, is quite clearly imposing an extra cost on their WFH employees which they are not imposing on their office workers.

This doesn't seem ambiguous to me, it's just not become an issue yet because the harm is relatively small.

I'd trade the stolen electricity and internet for my stolen commute time, gas money, and vehicle wear any time.

By this logic, your employer should have subjected you to something much worse originally, so you'd be happy to pay the vehicle wear and tear, gas, and commute time.

Correct. This isn't revealing. Norm conditions were worse originally (in factories and other industries) and had settled in a less worse condition recently. Now it's less worse again and people are happier. Unsurprising.

Exactly what I came to say. They pay for a limited resource. The download and upload rates. Which is indeed limited in availability. With the light its not much different than driving around and enjoying looking at others Christmas lights. You didn't buy their lights, they bought them, but you derive value / joy from them which was their purpose.

Maybe more simply put, they’re using the “wasted” light ?

Exactly. If neighbor doesn't want their light "stolen", then they can use a curtain and stop throwing the light onto the street. If they don't want rats to "steal" their peanuts, they can grab them from the bag without dropping and leaving a handful on the road.

The author is mixing a lot of largely unrelated topics. Emitting light from your residence is just an externality that can be positive or negative depending on the situation.

The question “who should pay for lighting?” is a classic question that comes up when discussing street lights in the context of theoretical user-pays economics models. As in “what services can potentially be implemented in a user-pays model? for instance you can’t practically charge somebody for benefitting from a street light”.

Using somebody else’s wifi is related to neither of those topics, because that’s about consuming somebody else’s limited resources without their permission. The legality and morality of that question relates to whether the wifi broadcaster should expect that to occur when using unsecured wifi, and whether they should have any obligation to take reasonable steps to prevent it if they don’t want it happening.

> the harm is relatively small

Try working from a Third World country, you connecting to your company's bandwidth-hungry VPN means anyone sharing the wifi won't be able to do anything.

VPNs don't usually consume any significant bandwidth overhead at all which makes me curious as to what service your employer is using?

I’ve heard many WFH setups that record your screen and monitor your camera to make sure you’re actually working. There could be monitoring stuff bundled with the VPN that does consume many resources (or IT dept is screen recording remotely).

It's not the VPN itself but the software that makes the traffic

Both light and and wifi are EM waves. Stealing wifi is just you stealing their "light" and them stealing "your light."

Presumably it’s not “WiFi” being taken here but access to the internet and use of the limited bandwidth.

The EM waves is just how they get there.

This analogy only holds for packet sniffing.

If the stealer is actually connecting to the wifi and making their own requests, then they have literally stolen a percentage of limited bandwidth of the channel.

Candle-light is more expensive than bandwidth is today. Also, bandwidth is the use over a specified allotment.

Aside from the obvious analog that your neighbors wifi is literally a light you cannot see, if they aren't maxing out their bandwidth, then it makes similarly no difference that you use it.

It's not 10 years ago, the neighborhood using your router for Facebook doesn't dent the bandwidth.

So how is it not comparable to stray light?

> if they aren't maxing out their bandwidth, then it makes similarly no difference that you use it

That is a big assumption right there. The neighborhood streaming 4k cat videos from youtube could make a massive dent, and I can easily use all the bandwidth I have for my own needs.

That's before we consider the potential consequences of them "borrowing" my IP address and all. Of course it's on me to keep my network secure so I don't let that happen, but in theory they could find the next vulnerability that lets them in.

>if they aren't maxing out their bandwidth

The analogy is only in the contextually relevant case of a limited resource and the consumption.

The juxtaposition of individual vs collectivism, and the inevitable tragedy of the commons, was the relevance.

Of course, any technical analogy on HN gets pedantically deconstructed into atomic trivialness.

Anywho - if you don't broadcast your SSID, or, even less dismissively, don't Faraday cage your house, then anyone interacting with the electromagnetic field that you haphazardly allow to escape the privacy of your residence is within their rights to do so.

> Anywho - if you don't broadcast your SSID, or, even less dismissively, don't Faraday cage your house, then anyone interacting with the electromagnetic field that you haphazardly allow to escape the privacy of your residence is within their rights to do so.

Are you seriously arguing that anyone is allowed to tamper with your mobile phone signal as long as you're at home and they're outside the walls?

Yes, and it is legal, and commonly done.

You are allowed to broadcast a cell phone tower signal and MiTM the connection.

You are not forcing others to connect to your signal.

The spirit of this freedom is even emblazoned on every compliant device, look for the FCC warning.

As for jamming, that is entirely unrelated, not comparable, and illegal. It would be akin to blaring loud music and lights.

> anyone interacting with the electromagnetic field that you haphazardly allow to escape the privacy of your residence is within their rights to do so

You seem to have an insufficient understanding of how wireless communication protocols work, in particular the 'communication' aspect. Simply detecting the signal would not allow you to use the WiFi network. You would have to establish a connection with the access point and actively and continuously exchange information with it, thereby directly using its resources.

This is not the same as coming across a fallen coin in the street, or reading by ambient light emitted by someone else's candle

Reading by the ambient light emitted is constantly exchanging photons, which is information communication. Picking up a fallen coin is displacing localized complexity.

If it wasn't, you wouldn't be given any extra photons to bounce off the book and into your eyes, and wouldn't know of the candle across the street, since the photons were "insufficient" to make themselves known to you.

Again, pedantically deconstructing a technical analogy to dismiss it on its merits is going to be hard when faced with a more pedantic pissant.

The point of the entire exercise is to acknowledge the collective vs individual contributions to the emergent tragedy of the commons.

> Reading by the ambient light emitted is constantly exchanging photons, which is information communication.

Wrong. You don't emit photons

> Picking up a fallen coin is displacing localized complexity.

That's a meaningless statement

> Again, pedantically deconstructing a technical analogy to dismiss it on its merits is going to be hard when faced with a more pedantic pissant.

It's an analogy that doesn't work, picking apart the differences is revealing

> The point of the entire exercise is to acknowledge the collective vs individual contributions to the emergent tragedy of the commons.

Another meaningless statement

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