Should I teach them a lesson?

You can if you are an idiot. Do you know what the USC is? Do you want to have civil or criminal charges pressed against you? I hope whoever you are trying to do this to figures out what happened, happens to be a lawyer and drags your *** through the dirt. That is so petty and malicious and it is NOT your place (legally, morally or otherwise) to teach anyone a "lesson".

Are there any legal ramifications if you were to do so? I would think carefully before doing anything like that, as tempting as it is.

If you are absolutely sure there can be no legal fallout, then I would plant a file prominently on the desktop that, when opened, reads something like:

I hope you enjoyed your free Internet access. You should know that while you gained free access, I gained entry to all of your personal files. You are lucky I am not a thief.

That should instill enough fear to teach him/her a lesson.

I would. They don't realize they are just asking for trouble. What happens if a nieghbor kid downloads an MP3 off their wireless connection, or hacks the FBI, guess who gets in trouble. Ignorance is not an excuse. Their connection their problem.

I'm with you, I don't do anything that would actually cause harm, but I will pull a few pranks, and have fun doing so. I typically change my MAC address on my card to though, just in case...

No.. obviously, they don't know what they're doing. They might have even set up their own wireless router, but connected to yours just because it was on their list. Do you have any evidence that they did this on purpose?

In addition, it's one thing to have someone connect to your router, it's another to purposely invade their privacy, even if it's for a prank. Bottom line, what did they do to you? Stole some bandwidth? Besides, you don't know who they are. Maybe they're the violent type and don't take to pranks too well. If the rewards of compassion don't draw you, think of the possibility of retribution.

Chances are they won't even know what happened or how it happened. The effort would be wasted, and the lesson would be lost on them.

It would probably be better to just enable and set the encryption.

Sounds like a winner to me. But get some porn pics and put them in his picture folder. The best joke is the subtle one. Put them in files all over the place and you leave his computer and then password protect yours. Then on those lonely nights just before you go to bed, a slight chuckle will pass your lips knowing that guy is going crazy trying to figure how that virus got in. lol

definately, go for it, at the end of the day they are accessing your connection without your permission, even worse they could have been looking round your pc as well, teach them a wee lesson

i thkn it would be fine to do something simple like print a page, or change the backgrond, as long as you tell them how and why it happened. but keep in mind that as far as i know they weren;t doing anything wrtong. they were just using an unsecured wireless network. your scare should be more aimed at teaching them to petter protect themselves.

Aw, come on man... That's not cool. If ya want them to stop using the connection just lock it back down.

the big q is if they can access your router, are they then smart enough to retaliate to your scare tactics?

dont start something that may ultimately cause you grief in the long run..

good luck though