Help settle a dispute...

[r_e_mercia]

Calling on all my joyous geek friends:
A colleague and I are having a dispute about what the correct term is for accessing a neighbour's WiFi network without authorisation. I thought it was just "hacking", he seems to think it's "snooping" and my supervisor thinks it's "diving". Any other terms?

Comments

[totherme]

lol - it didn't even occur to me to look in mainstream media for a definition ;)

I wonder how the relationship between the likes of the beeb, and the folk who invent the things that require the new words will evolve. Certainly, I think it likely that the phrases "wifi theft" and "wireless hijacking" were made up by lawyers and publicists, rather than engineers, hackers or crackers... Does that make those words more or less "correct"?

[totherme]

A related term is "wardriving", when you cruise around in a car looking for open wifi to use.

There are those that would take exception to the use of the word "hack" to imply anything illegal... They prefer the word "crack", which by their definition is at least one of the words which you could use. Probably not the most specific word though.

My understanding of the word "diving" is as a metaphor for speed-reading large quantities of data - often in a networked system or some kind. Compare "trawling" - which is in my opinion the same act, but with less joy and elegance. (the most cool and prominent place I can immediately remember seeing this word is in the english subtitles of Ghost In the Shell, and the spin off series Standalone Complex. I imagine it appears in a lot of other cyberpunk too... Can anyone remember if it was used in Neuromancer

[pozorvlak]

Considering the other hackish meanings of snarf, that could be a good one...

I don't think there is a standard term. I'd feel uncomfortable using "hack" or "crack" unless there was some actual cracking involved: ie, if some form of encryption had been broken, or some security had been circumvented. These days, I think running an unencrypted WiFi node is tantamount to an invitation to all-comers to use it, though I suspect the law might view things differently.

Personally, I tend to use the rather boring "steal" or "nick", even though they're not quite right.

[pozorvlak]

Possibly "wifi phreaking" might be appropriate...

[totherme]

Yeah - that seems close to the mark to me.

[hildabeast]

*tries to remember back to MT last year, before we got internet in our house, that day that we discovered the neighbours had WiFi...* now what did we say? personally i'd go for something along the lines of "stealing" since if they have a limit on it they might end up paying more cos you've used it all. but then they shouldn't have been silly enough to leave it unencoded and easily accessible!

[r_e_mercia]

As a lawyer I would say "stealing" (and that was my off the cuff answer). Actually as such it doesn't much matter whether the network is guarded or unguarded - in the same way if you left your room door open and someone walked in and nicked your wallet it would still be theft. But I think in this instance people were talking more specifically about breaking into a network.

[hildabeast]

doesn't work as an analogy, because them getting warm from it too doesn't make you any less warm. whereas some providers have a bandwidth limit (i think NTL's used to be like, 3GB (or 3 big amounts of bytes, i forget which is bigger) and you have to pay extra if you exceed it.

a better analogy would be you having some sort of weird sprinkler system with a limited amount of water...

[necaris]

Where on earth did diving come from, I wonder? Words I've seen include "sniffing" -- which technically means just listening to all the data packets, and I'm not sure contributing to the flow by joining into the network is implied -- and "stumbling", which I'm surprised no one has mentioned here yet, but that's (I believe) looking for networks with a hope that you'll stumble upon one that's open and usable.

If you break the encryption on a network and join in, I think it's "cracking" and/or some form of "stealing", as you say.

[pozorvlak]

I'd call stumbling "wardriving", derived from the older term "wardialling" (automatically dialling every telephone number in a specified range, looking for modem tones). Not sure if a car is required.

[necaris]

For wardriving, a car or something is required -- AFAIK you can "stumble" by going to a couple of cafes and hoping for an open AP, but "wardriving" seems to connote more mobility?

[short1sandwich]

I'd use the term 'scrumpling', but that's mostly because it's a fun sounding word.

[r_e_mercia]

Actually, scrumping (or net-scrumping) might work well as a word to cover it...has connurtations of breaking in, the wrong-doer takes a small amount of what is posessed (there being generally more apples/bandwidth than is taken), the tree/net isn't generally damaged (though could be, if improperly climbed/used to download illegal stuff) and the wrong-doer doesn't see it as particularly harmful. And also there's a nice pun on apples to be made. Hrm, I quite like scrumping.