You mention a lot of vanity mods that can be performed, and I agree many of those are harmless and cosmetic. Sure, there are probably a ton of cosmetic and basic, safe mods that can be performed to your vehicle. To the best of my knowledge, there are lots of regulations that automotive parts are required to adhere to. You are talking about buying pieces that have been manufactured up to whatever standards have been set as required. Do you think we will have the same standards placed on the firmware and those who are hacking out code for this?

I'm all for freedom and love to tinker and mod devices. It's fun, most of the readers on this site likely do the same. What I take concern with is the fact that any idiot can anonymously dump faulty firmware onto the internet and start causing wrecks and injury to other drivers. Perhaps I'm wrong, but if someone manufactures tires and rims, they are probably going to be a lot easier to track down and hold accountable.

Now, on the less extreme end, if there was a NO_SPEEDING flag I would gladly change it. However, I can't picture myself driving any car that I have no control over. It just sounds like a terrible idea.

Do you really trust anyone who has the ability to mod their car to do so? What about if it has the ability to mess with the internal systems of the vehicle. Oops... no brakes... looks like a bug in that nightly mod I just flashed....

You and maybe others might not care about what they want to do with this item, and I do understand your view that you own the hardware and do not care what the companies desires are. Well why should the company care what you, a small percentage of users want to do to the hardware? They are going to lock it down to try and protect their revenue streams. If they can not do this or do not have the ability you can expect the prices on these items to rise and then you would be throwing a fit that the price isnt as attractive. If you can get the item at a cheap price you should expect that there is going to be a reason. This is a company, not a charity, they are selling this product at very low margins to try and generate revenue off of other items. If they could not expect to generate revenue off of other items, you are going to have to pay more for the item. Which way would you rather have it?

Here is another good one that might actually make it! Take these petitions seriously

Could the same not be argued about malicious/annoying scripting language code, or any interpreted code for that matter?

Maybe its just me, but I think that depending on what country you are in the laws for what you are responsible for change quite a bit.

I would think that the average computer user is a bit more intelligent than they used to be (Yes, I do work as a sys/net admin, and yes I have done desktop support before). While, intelligence might not be the right word to use, lets say more aware. After so long the newbies have to learn enough to at least have an idea on where to go to get help.

I think it was only a matter of time before we started seeing things like this happen. Although I often find myself wondering when we will start seeing more malware that's not in english, or aimed at english speaking peoples.

I have to agree with you about it not being anything new. We've seen similar tricks with people spoofing ebay, paypal and the like. While we can all agree that it is clever to insert the fake reviews, surely we all should have known something like this wouldn't be too far off.

I will be interested in what these sites have to say about the fake reviews.

I dont see anything wrong with their choice. This is what the content providers want and Hulu really needs to play by their rules if they want to stay legit.

They are in a good position right now. They give people what they are wanting (people that would probably be downloading a torrent otherwise) and seem to have made the content providers happy so far, allowing them a broader array of media than they would have without. (well if they didnt want to deal with messy legal matters at some point).

I dont see why everyone is complaining, its their choice and Hulu chose, its the same choice I would make in their position...

I don't understand why everyone keeps trying to move away from keeping anything local nowadays. Programming is a task that I usually do without needing to be online. I really don't think I like the idea of that going away. Its starting to bother me how many "web" versions of applications I see nowadays. A lot of what I run into doesn't even seem to allow you to cache much or to load an offline copy. An example would be my phone, which comes with a gps that refuses to cache the maps. Pretty pointless in a lot of situations. I guess I just see this as a solution without a problem. Sure, maybe it was fun to do and maybe there will be some neat uses for it later on. Also I have trouble seeing using this to program desktop applications, wouldn't you prefer to be using the same environment your programming for?