In case you missed this on Slashdot, Nokia has released a bunch of made-up fairy tales about warchalking and the BBC faithfully reported on it as fact. Some choice shibboleths from the Finnish boot-maker-turned-cellular-giant:
- "This is theft, plain and simple," wrote Nokia in its advisory.
- The company said that anyone using a company's bandwidth without permission is reducing the amount of a valuable resource available to the workers in that organisation
- Nokia warned that if too many warchalkers log on together, the whole network inside a company could slow down.
- It also said that unscrupulous spammers could use a network as a proxy to despatch millions of unwanted e-mail messages with no danger of being traced.
Followup: here's another good response from some Danish wireless enthusiasts. Ah, the sweet smell of FUD in the morning.
(Thanks, Higgins!)