There is so much that is wrong with this article...

[BlueCross]

"Is Stealing Wireless Wrong?"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6960304.stm

The first paragraph:
A man has been arrested after being spotted allegedly sitting in a street with a laptop using someone else's unsecured wireless connection. Is it immoral to do this?

Well, sure, I think it is completely immoral to arrest someone for doing this.

But, of course, that is not what they meant, is it...

The article also often blurs the lines between the legal aspects and the moral aspects, making it a somewhat confusing read.

Then they ask a philosopher (Nick Bostrom from Oxford) and his first line is "I haven't thought about it" which pretty much washes away the rest of his opinion.

Actually, the comments by the readers were more interesting than the article (for a change).

They should have just come to me first.

[Chucara]

Hypothetical, but entirely likely scenario:

"Guy" rides on the bus. Guy turns on his laptop during the trip. During this trip, his PC connects to the nearest unsecured access point without any action on his part. Immoral? Not bloody likely.

"Man" drops thousands of small electronic devices that connect to the nearest unsecured access point and start a distributed denial of service attack on some server.

One is clearly immoral, one is clearly not.

There are shades to this, but generally, anyone with an unsecured network shouldn't complain. Neither should ISPs, as they've already been paid for the bandwidth.

It's kinda like not locking your doors, putting up a sign that says "valuables inside!" and then wondering why the insurance company doesn't pay. No, strike that. It's like taking a piece of tape, laying it upside down on the sidewalk, putting dollar bills on the sticky side. And when someone steps on it, you accuse them of thievery.

[Hoopy Frood]

I don't see the immorality of it either. As others have said, flooding the network or trying to crack into it is immoral. Using someone else's bandwidth because they left their network unsecured is fine. Heck, coffeeshops frequently have free wireless. Essentially their networks are open access.

But, for those looking for free bandwidth, bear in mind that there are a lot of scammers running free networks (particularly at airports). Make sure you have the SSID correct for the legitimate network so you aren't having all your packets sniffed via a scammer's network.