wireless hijacking?!?

A UK man has been sentenced to 12 months conditional discharge, had his laptop and wireless cards conviscated, and been fined 500 quid for surfing the net off his neighbor’s wireless connection. I know I’m not the only one who’s shocked. As the BBC reported, “The perception in the past has been that borrowing a bit of bandwidth is cheeky but not really criminal behaviour.” Well, since the ISPs are the ones who suffer when we do not each have our own subscription, the times they are a changin’.

In other news, the BBC has been running a series of articles on the digital age: interviews with bloggers, podcasters, creative commons devotees; they’ve also been soliciting readers’ views on how the digital age has changed their lives. While some of those articles are rather superficial, I really appreciate that the BBC is taking this on as an ongoing theme. Some of the articles are more practical: this one on blogging while on vacation. Or their article on RSS feeds. Very hands-on.