This is just a guess, but I believe your assessment why you were modded down is correct. Making comments that might offend people has consequences.
Your post is off topic, and bashes Microsoft for things not relevant. As for your previous posts, having modded comments, previous posts are pretty much impossible to find. Modding is based on the current comment.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft. I've been playing and working with computers since before Microsoft existed. I've posted on this thread. Canada is the party at fault, Microsoft is just responding to a stupid law.
I love bashing Microsoft, but the pickings have been slim lately, they're failing. They won't go out of business, but their clout is gone.

A security notice for a purchased product could be considered to be of a commercial nature.
Are you willing to bet the farm on it?
Your legal fees will be over $1,000,000 even if you win.
OH! and the idiot that sued you is penniless, forget recovery.

Seemed like a good idea. I don't think so, but someone did.
What an absolute fail of a law.
It might work if the sender could reasonably presume that if the email address didn't end in .ca it wasn't a problem.
The cost. of defense is too high. Canada just screwed the pooch.

There may be a bright side. It will force international law to cross the internet. As this is a Canadian law, only addresses ending in .ca should matter. Of course that opens a much bigger can of worms.

Then again it could just result in an explicit opt in: I AM NOT A CANADIAN! If you check it an lie you are guilty of perjury. NO Canadians allowed.
Perhaps the future of an internet second class.

Of course I'm being melodramatic. But this law is melodramatic. Some idiot with no clue wrote it, and got it passed. It deserves derision.

well, you just described a way to tweak an algorithm.
wouldn't even have to go to a 256 bit key. Doing that into MD5 would probably foil anything less than a concerted financial attack.
No media outlet could afford the computing power to attack that.
I used the same approach, with some further tweaks to secure financial communications a decade ago.

Lack of understanding security doesn't surprise me. I'm an engineer who does. I designed and wrote a suite that passed a 3d party, hostile, security audit.

nope, it has to do with the key. given a tag # and license # you can dictionary attack the hash. especially since the the source data is known, easy to break.

they didn't pre-anonamize the keys

You've elegantly described why stiff federal penalties are needed.

Interesting that when a direct line to someone's pocketbook is defined everyone gets on board, but when it's just a chance someone's drinking water would be tainted with cancer causing chemicals most can't find the connection.
Corporate malfeasance comes in all forms.

Small problem.
Taxi Hack numbers are available in a publicly accessible data base.
A determined individual probably could find license numbers, they may be publicly accessible.
Failure to understand the vulnerability is the design failure.
A simple solution would have been to order the hashes numerically and re-number them cardinally. ie. 1,2,3 ...
Would take less than a minute, for someone than knew how.
Perhaps a few hours if the right person had to be tracked down.
Never release source data.

Using any public hash exposes you to dictionary attacks. Especially when you publish which one you've used.
The quality of the encryption is irrelevant.
Security through obscurity, using a custom algorithm, is the only way.
Taking MD5, it's published, and tweaking a few points (though who ever did this needs to be very competent) would have been sufficient.

Some manager probably said any work for addition security wasn't worth the cost. Ooops!

OK, my subject is an exaggeration.
The ship is still sinking.
Apple isn't winning the desktop space. But Microsoft is still losing. Linux never really made the field.
I won't go into the mobile space, where desktop is going, but MS is losing badly there.

US campaign laws are tissue paper.
SO thin you wouldn't want to wipe with them.

You're confusing the Commodore version with the Apple version.
Admittedly, the gun always aimed. You just had to fire at the right time. And in some cases have the correct weapon