OK. I am sorry I used the term theft. I was throwing it in loosely and didn't realise it would get interpreted in its biblical sense.
The original post from Squawk 2650 quite clearly states
I have a friend who has just brought a laptop and can connect to an unsecured wireless network which isn’t his so I take it that it must be someone else in his street that has one.
Thus his friend is obviously aware the connection is not being paid for out of his hard earned euros. I am apologetic that I did not point this out clearly. At all times I have assumed that the user was well aware that the connection was not theirs to flaunt.
Not being a PDA owner I am not sure of the connection procedure. If as you say:-
[I]So, if I went and sat on the steps outside my local library, where I knew there was "free" wi-fi access, fired up my PDA, turned on the wi-fi feature, ran Internet Explorer and successfully connected, I would not necessarily know to which network I had connected.[Then surely this is a major flaw in the design of PDA's. If you firstly do not know which network you are on, this could mean you may not have power over which network you connect to. Over to other PDA owners to clarify.
What is interesting is that earlier on you say it is alright if the connection was already on:-
If the wireless connection was "on" then presumably it wasn't costing the owner anything extra
to have someone connected wirelessly to their ISP -
Yet recently you state if it occurred accidentally, you could not be accussed of "Dishonestly obtaining electronic communications services".
So is it alright/legal or not?