By John Leyden for The Register
This article has been reproduced from The Register, with permission.
The case – brought under the Communications Act 2003 – is the first "war driving" prosecution in the UK, according to the police. Officers caught Straszkiewicz hunting for "free" net connections in a residential area after complaints from locals. Straszkiewicz deliberately set out to borrow bandwidth from his unwitting benefactors but there's no evidence he had any hostile motive beyond this – so his sentence seems harsh. It's unclear whether anyone who accidentally jumped onto another party's net connection (easy to do if a host is using an unsecured connection with no encryption) might also risk prosecution.
