Physically they can illicitly take your signature and manipulate the resulting document, but legally they cannot. That is the point here.

While you may have a point regarding the act of giving such permission being an indictment against one's judiciousness, that has no immediate bearing on whether one has such a reputation in the first place.

Obviously, significance is in the eye of the reputation holder, potentially to be determined by the court.

The real point is making this an expensive enough episode for the perpetrators to discourage such behavior in the future. By most accounts, it came as a surprise to the victims that postings had been made without their approval. This creates considerable question as to whether the perps made a good-faith effort to inform them of what they were agreeing to.

Garnering misplaced trust may not be actionable in and of itself, but deceit to gain and or abuse of that trust can be. A material question, then, is whether the attendees so exploited actually had a "100x cooler" experience or whether they felt betrayed, ripped-off and demeaned. Evidence suggests the latter and actionable misconduct by Comic Con.

Astroturfing is reprehensible enough without hijacking peoples' identities to do it.

Harm to one's reputation or public image is a demonstrable and prosecutable harm. If one were to enjoy a reputation as a sensible and judicious person, some of the comments I've seen, which were purported to be the postings in question, would do harm to it.

Your comment does draw further attention to the potential harm that might befall the readers of such postings, who would have been wilfully mislead.

In ghost writing the individual for whom the writing service is provided has knowledge of the product and editorial rights over it. The people whose identities were abused, here, had no such opportunity to control what was published under their names.

To suggest that I "cheapen the meaning of everything" is offensive, cheap, and wrong. It is you who cheapen the milieu of rational discourse at Slashdot. You should be ashamed.

No, that was just an example of a right you can't sign away. Indeed, a closer analogy would be indentured servitude, a contract that was "freely" entered into, but wherein one relinquished one's rights as an individual, for a specified period. Note that it was the same stroke of the pen that eliminated slavery, which also eliminated indentured servitude .

What your are describing is a situation where the word posted did, in fact, originate with you; you simply want to disown them after the fact. That is substantially different than the case where the words did not originate with you and you were given no opportunity to vet them before they were assigned to you.

They can do those things on your behalf, but it must be so stated, legally and formally and they may not assume your identity to do so. They must do so under their own identity, on your behalf.

Someone cannot apply for credit, file their taxes, or vote under another's identity, even with the rightful identity holder's complicity. The people whose identities were hijacked were not the only victims here, by any means. Those who read the posts were deliberately given the impression that the individual posts were the product of the person whose identity was attached to the post. That's fraud. Prosecute them.

An established principle in the law is that there are certain rights you cannot sign away. For instance, you cannot legally, voluntarily or otherwise, enter into slavery in the United States of America. It remains for the courts to decide if one's identity is one of those rights. Prosecute them.

... for identity theft. Period.

Clearly, the people reading such comments are the ones responsible for them; othewise the poster wouldn't make the effort.

I was of the impression that anything that accesses the cell network already has a unique IMEI adddress and that devices that access networks have a unique MAC address. What does this provide that they don't? It would seem this information could be spoofed at least as easily as such hardware addresses.

Spend some time around a 2-year old and you'll realize all kids start as psychopaths, some grow out of it, some become Wall Street bankers.

... and little else will change.

... what really need are laws keeping Congress out of science. Of course, government funding is needed, but in the area of administration Congress can't even keep their own house, (or their own House), in order.