I bought a used laptop, and while I was configuring the drivers and trying to get the ethernet card working, I suddenly discovered that I was online, without the computer being plugged into my network. I have no wireless router or network here, and everything is wired.

What that means is that I must be on someone's unsecured network, without even knowing it.

Is that legal?

I have numerous neighbors, so there's no way to tell whose service I'm on, but the whole thing's a bit disconcerting.

I mean, suppose I was downloading illegal things. I could be a pervert sitting in a parked car anywhere around here. How would anyone know who I was?

Now that I'm feeling totally wicked, I'll just go ahead and post this.

(From God knows where...)

MORE: My helpful side wants to be a good neighbor and advise whoever has this service that they might do well to install a router and secure firewall or something. But how do I determine where I am?

AND MORE: CNN Money had an article on this, but it doesn't address unintentional situations like the instant one:

The legality of stealing your neighbor's connection is murky at best.

"All of this stuff is so new, it's hard to say what the liability issues are," said Robert Hale, a San Francisco-based attorney who recently published an academic paper on the subject.

Hale points out that there is a federal law on the books that ostensibly prohibits using someone's access point with out their permission. But "without permission" is vaguely defined and the law seems more geared towards computer hacking.

It seems pretty clear that if you hack your neighbor's password then it could be reasonably argued you didn't have authorization.

But securing many older wireless systems with a password is difficult and even newer ones can be a challenge if you're running multiple computers or multiple operating systems. And, while it may be a violation of the user agreements with Internet service providers, some community-minded users deliberately leave their connections open for others to borrow.

"It's a gray area," said Paul Stamp, an analyst at the technology consultants Forester Research. "By not restricting access it could be argued that you're implicitly making that available."