Why is the suggestion that someone might download pornography specifically worthy of note? To the best of my knowledge, that is not an illegal activity.

More worrying surely if they use it to "file share" large amounts of copyright protected music or film, or perhaps to transact indecent images of children.

In essence, the concern might be that they do somethig *illegal* which might be traced back to your internet connection, leaving you with a difficult discussion with the police.

In fact, I think it would be possible to prove it was not you, as the exact details would not match to your home PC. The problem is that the police would have no idea who it was that did do it. That is, somone would have maintained their anonymity.

The Government of the day is not too keen on anonymity, even when no law is broken. This is why they seek to classify "piggybacking" as theft.

Bob, Reading,

The law is an ass.

It would be better to define unprotected WiFi to be open access, but criminalise hacking into protected systems. It is, after all, not much of an intellectual challenge to password protect your system.

I sometimes wonder who writes these laws, and whether they actually understand what they have just written.

Mike Poulsen, Reading, Berkshire

Utter nonsense. I frequently check my email on a piggybacked wifi connection, because it is convenient and hurts nobody. Moreover, reciprocally, I leave my wifi router at home unpassworded because I am quite happy for passing strangers to use a bit of my paid-for service.
I dispute that doing this is a criminal offence, because (a) there is no dishonest intent; (b) I am not trying to avoid any charge. If I am sitting in a cafe and my computer tells me the wifi of the pub over the road is available, there is no cost-bearing alternative available. If there were, I would use it.
I agree that it would be unfair to download a movie through such a connection, but I don't. I don't use enough bandwidth to make any substantial difference to the subscriber. And - of course - what somebody else might do on a piggybacked connection is nothing to do with the ethics of me doing it. It's a simple matter of convenience that harms nobody. In fact it causes good karma to accrue to the subscriber!

Thomas Goodey, Cuxton-upon-Medway, UK