Skip to content

cearta.ie

the Irish for rights

Menu
  • About
  • Privacy Policy
  • Disclaimer
  • Contact
  • Research

Tag: Wifi

If the router don’t store it, you must acquit – War-driving in Holland

22 March, 2011
| No Comments
| General

On the main site, I have on several occasions considered the legality of war-driving, ie, piggy-backing on someone else’s open wifi. Here’s an interesting, if minor, example of the genre from the Netherlands:

If the router don’t store it, you must acquit

A court in the Netherlands has ruled that hacking a WiFi connection is not inherently illegal. But the ruling was based more on a technicality in the law than the principle, meaning it’s possible officials could seek to update legislation.

The ruling is actually a small part of a wider case involving a student who posted on the notorious 4chan board threatening to shoot people at a Dutch high school (for which he received a community service sentence.)

The post was made while using somebody else’s WiFi connection without permission, which led to prosecutors tacking on a hacking charge to the case — a charge that was dismissed, even though the network had been secured.

The reason for the ruling is that the wording of Dutch law says only computers can be hacked, and defines a computer as a machine that processes, transmits and stores data. The student accessed the Internet connection through a wireless router which — because it doesn’t store data (beyond user settings) — is not classed as a computer.

…

Read More »

Welcome

Me in a hat

Hi there! Thanks for dropping by. I’m Eoin O’Dell, and this is my blog: Cearta.ie – the Irish for rights.


“Cearta” really is the Irish word for rights, so the title provides a good sense of the scope of this blog.

In general, I write here about private law, free speech, and cyber law; and, in particular, I write about Irish law and education policy.


Academic links
Academia.edu
ORCID
SSRN
TARA

Subscribe

  • RSS Feed
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn

Recent posts

  • Subrogation – and liens, charges, and other securities – after Promontoria (Oyster) DAC v Kean [2023] IECA 181 (17 July 2023)
  • Of stalking horses and dogs that did not bark: 303 Creative LLC v Elenis, standards of review, commercial speech, and the end of the beginning of the modern First Amendment
  • The settlement in Carey v Independent News & Media and the status of Bloomberg v ZXC in Ireland
  • Recent developments with traffic data retention – variously updated
  • Cúigiú lá breithe shona don RGCS
  • The Communications (Retention of Data) (Amendment) Act 2022: ignore the warnings, legislate in haste, repent at leisure – variously updated
  • Another heckler’s veto in Trinity

Archives by month

Categories by topic

Recent tweets

Tweets by @cearta

Licence

Creative Commons License

This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. I am happy for you to reuse and adapt my content, provided that you attribute it to me, and do not use it commercially. Thanks. Eoin

Credit where it’s due

Some of those whose technical advice and help have proven invaluable in keeping this show on the road include Dermot Frost, Karlin Lillington, Daithí Mac Síthigh, and
Antoin Ó Lachtnáin. I’m grateful to them; please don’t blame them :)

Thanks to Blacknight for hosting.

Feeds and Admin

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

© cearta.ie 2023. Powered by WordPress