Wardriving: you can look, but don't touch
Wardriving --the practice of driving around with a portable computing device and Wi-Fi antenna, looking for open Wi-Fi networks--is not new. In fact, wardialing, or calling up random phone numbers looking for modem connections, has been going on for at least 20 years. There is, however, a new ethical debate surrounding wardriving, whether it's legal, and whether it serves a larger purpose.
Courts haven't exhaustively tested the concept, but the common assumption is that simply discovering open wireless networks is legal. Trespassing is not. In fact, Patrick Ryan, assistant lecturer and PhD candidate at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, sees many benefits from wardriving, arguing in a recent paper published in the Virginia Journal of Law & Technology that by codifying the principles of wardriving, we may also help to define a code of ethics for contemporary computer hackers (that's hackers in the tinkerer sense).
