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.

Quite truthy, but that overlooks an increasing population that exceeded agricultural demand and the fact that the peasants doing the work were now in the same boat as the factory workers; they were disposable labor. Of course, you can lay some of the blame for that on social change, but much of the social change on the farm was driven by the changes in town and the financial impacts that had for the feudal model.

Bear in mind, they were characteristically also evicted from their homes by the lord, who still owned their homes.