Last week the OPP charged a man in Morrisburg, Ontario for what appears to have been theft of wi-fi. (Sparse) Details in my post on the topic (and see Glenn Fleishman’s take here).
What surprises me about the story is the lack of Canadian mainstream media interest in the issue. When a Florida man was charged in similar circumstances last year, the media (and blog) interest was pronounced, and the attention served an important purpose – what followed that event was intensive public debate – in the media, on blogs, in podcasts, and elsewhere – about the proper boundaries of the criminal law when it comes to use of another’s wi-fi access (something that is actually quite a common practice).
But in Canada, a deafening silence. This actually isn’t the first case of this kind in Canada, but it seems that something salacious is needed to get the MSM interested in the story. I’d like to know more – was this a case of someone hopping on an open access point to grab some info on an MLS listing while doing the open house circuit, or another case of naked wardriving? Should it matter?
Perhaps we don’t have a large enough tech media / blogosphere yet to sustain interest and momentum on the more mundane (?) public policy aspects of these kinds of tech issues. For my part, I would have thought there were good public policy reasons to encourage the sharing of wi-fi access (putting aside the bandwidth provider’s TOS for the moment), provided it’s only the wi-fi that is shared. And surely there is good reason to suppose that those who control wi-fi access points are themselves responsible for ensuring they are secured – enabling WPA is by now a pretty mundane task. But in any event, I have to say I’m mystified by the lack of journalism and debate. If you’ve seen any of a particularly Canadian flavour, please leave a link in the comments.