Click to see: Wi-Fi mooching illustration

a) guilty of stealing from the service provider; b) committing an unethical act; c) really cheap; d) not guilty; or e) all of the above.

The correct answer is wide open to debate. But the range of possible answers - and there are plenty more we could list - is indicative of the variety of passionately held opinions and legal murk on this question, which gained renewed attention last month.

What do you think? Discuss and
debate in our Wi-Fi Mooching forum.

That was when news reports surfaced about the April arrest of Benjamin Smith , who St. Petersburg, Fla., police allege "wilfully, knowingly and without authorization" accessed a home Wi-Fi network from a parked car in front of someone's house.

Depending on your viewpoint, Smith was stealing, mooching, hijacking, sharing, borrowing or just using the homeowner's Internet connection. As we learned in interviews with Wi-Fi users and others, thinking on this subject is continually changing.

New worries or no worries

Homes and small businesses have been the fastest-growing market for wireless LAN (WLAN ) equipment over the past couple of years, and users are now starting to know enough about wireless either to worry about having an open access point or to not worry.

A Jupiter Research survey last year of consumers with wireless home networks found the top concerns were identity theft, eavesdropping and virus attacks. Yet some users actually encourage shared use, even though nearly all service providers forbid it in their broadband contracts. One example is Newbury Open Net , which is a free, open WLAN spanning the length of Boston's tony Newbury Street.

Using an unprotected wireless link is very easy and seems to cause no harm, some say. Elizabeth Weinberg, who now works in a New York custom photo lab, was living off-campus in Boston during her senior year in college. She and two roommates didn't want to pay an extra $20 each per month for broadband service. Then came the siren song of a solid Wi-Fi signal from somewhere in the apartment building.

"My roommate had an [Apple] iBook and it was picking up a high signal," she says. "We said, 'We'll just go with it.' "