http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/25 ... ver_fined/
A man was last week fined £500 after a British jury found him guilty of using a neighborhood wireless broadband connection without permission. Gregory Straszkiewicz, 24, was also sentenced to a 12 months conditional discharge after he was convicted of dishonestly obtaining an communications service and related offences at London's Islewoth Crown Court last Wednesday (20 July).
The case - brought under the Communications Act 2003 - is the first "war driving" prosecution in the UK, according 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.
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With only a quick look through sections of the act it is an offence to provide a network service without OFCOM approval. Hence someone who has an unsecured wireless network can be said to be providing an unlicensed network and committing an offence if it can be accessed by say a neighbour.
Generally hacking is a serious offence but to access an open network as some have said by a system automatically connecting to it should really have the emphasis on the 'provider' to secure the system. If the person had broken the WEP keys to access the network (And surprisingly easy to do even to 128bit keys using Linux based tools from what I've been reading and in incredible short periods of time) then the penalty would have been much greater as irrespective of the usage of the network he would have 'hacked' is way in.
I think there is more to this case than has been published.
