I suspect a lot of the outrage is rooted in forum dwellers freaking out at the idea there might be limits on how much they can harass people and any suggestion is attacked. In short, being horrible people is REALLY important to a significant and vocal part of the nerd/geek community, and they really do not want any tools for victims to counter them other than 'man up and ignore!'.

Yes, laws can be abused. What needs to be weighed is the benefits of the law against the costs.

By the looks of it, the original law was designed to address serial offenders like scam artists. So if they get caught and prosecuted, those individuals are less likely to keep doing it.

Yeah, if you are mugged you should be a man and just get over it, no reason to catch or prosecute the robber. People should just do whatever they want and their victims just need to man up and do whatever they want back. Who needs laws anyway.

Unless the law has been selectively enforced already, expanding its interpretation would go against precedent and thus be an uphill battle. I think some people here are falling for the 'adding an e changes everything!' when it does not always do so.

Not only does it require the user to be complicit, it requires the download channel to be vulnerable to man in the middle attacks so that the content can be changed mid stream. This is of course possible, but modern browsers make it non trivial to accomplish on all but the most focused cases.

Wait wait wait. If we are talking about little more than a word swap, wouldn't the standards that were previously applied to things like snail mail be the same for electronic communication? Has the law ever been used or interpreted to cover mailing a paperback fiction book counting?

This strikes me as going beyond a 'literal' interpretation of the law and goes well into the territory of taking serious liberties with the text and its interpretation. If all this is doing is extending existing laws for fraud and harassment to cover electronic transfers too, then looking to how those laws were applied by judges and lawyers would be a strong (if not outright binding) indicator of what the change actually means.

People who are careful to not publicly disclose the issue before it is fixed? Yeah, it was a mistake, but one Groupon takes rather seriously. This is not 'weaseling out', this is a legitimate gripe that they decided to call him on. They could have been more understanding and that would be nice of them, but their grievance is real and they should not be shamed into pretending it is not.

Even if 'only once, by mistake', he still did something that their disclosure rules explicitly said not to do or it invalided the process. It would be nice if they made an exception or were more understanding, but they are under no obligation and have every right to be pissed off, even if it was an accident.

Think about when a company accidently puts an archive of customer details up on their download site. Even if they fix it quickly and it was an honest mistake, they still screwed up and people are going to be annoyed with them.

I think we did not see the real expansion of DLS till we saw bundling of video and data services, so expansion fueled by media companies and their ability to get preferential treatment. Before that, telcos still made good money off leasing their lines, they got paid no matter which ISP the customer went with.

I have not really seen prices go down after deregulation, and I would say it did NOT produce competition in the least, it eliminated it almost completely. Companies folded left and right because they found themselves no longer accessible to their customer base. Overnight all your customers could become Verizon customers by virtue of Verizon making itself the only option to people on its lines.

Chances are the only reason that is possible in your area is that the local telco is voluntarily (or due to existing contracts) leasing its lines to other ISPs.

Well, it only executes in a root context if the application is given root access. There is not much you can do when you click the little 'yes I want to run this as root' confirmation. The OS can not really prevent exploits from being exploited in root level applications.

*nod* expecting a system to do more than it is intended to do might represent a problem with user expectations, but that is a whole other domain.

That is the job of the browser/downloader to detect, not Gatekeeper. Gatekeeper validates the App, not various data files it comes with.

Every once in a while some security tries restricting more system calls, but the functionality it strips breaks so many applications and annoys so many developers (and thus users who are no longer able to run things that used to work) that the attempt is backed off from.