Wireless piggybacking case sets precedent |

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Wireless piggybacking case sets precedent

27. March 2007, 8:52 Uhradmin

When 17-year-old Garyl Tan Jia Luo piggybacked on his neighbour’s unsecured wireless Internet network to chat online, he could not have imagined that in doing so he would make Asian legal history.

Information technology (IT) experts and lawyers say Tan was the first in Singapore, and possibly Asia, to be sentenced in court for “wireless mooching,” or piggybacking on an unsecured wireless network to surf the Internet.

A judge in the city-state’s district court sentenced him to 18 months’ probation in January.

Tech-savvy Singapore, one of Asia’s most wired nations, appears to be the regional pioneer in clamping down on wireless network freeloaders, IT experts and lawyers said.

They said they were not aware of similar prosecutions in the Asia-Pacific region, and that only a handful of cases had emerged over the past three years in North America.

“There is no similar criminal case in Hong Kong. And we believe Singapore is quite a pioneer in this area,” said Howard Lau, president of Hong Kong’s Professional Information Security Association, an industry grouping.

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A peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network relies primarily on the computing power and bandwidth of the participants in the network rather than concentrating it in a relatively low number of servers. P2P networks are typically used for connecting nodes via largely ad hoc connections. Such networks are useful for many purposes. Sharing content files (see file sharing) containing audio, video, data or anything in digital format is very common, and realtime data, such as telephony traffic, is also passed using P2P technology.A pure peer-to-peer network does not have the notion of clients or servers, but only equal peer nodes that simultaneously function as both "clients" and "servers" to the other nodes on the network. This model of network arrangement differs from the client-server model where communication is usually to and from a central server. A typical example for a non peer-to-peer file transfer is an FTP server where the client and server programs are quite distinct, and the clients initiate the download.