Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the last-of-2015 dept

With our week truncated by the holidays, voting was a little slow this time around. Nevertheless, we have a runaway winner taking the first place spots on both the insightful and funny sides. It came from an anonymous commenter in response to the Manhattan District Attorney's latest attacks on encryption:

Its a miracle anyone solved a crime before smartphones. They must have actually had to interview people, inspect crime scenes, and collect evidence with tweezers and cotton swabs. How barbaric!

In second place on the insightful side, we've got another comment on that post, this time from PaulT in response to the assertion that Apple implemented encryption specifically in order to avoid complying with law enforcement:

No, it implemented encryption largely due to customer demand as a result of news about extrajudicial activities by law enforcement.

Is it that these politicians are actually this stupid on this or that they think their constituents are?

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start by flipping over to another attack on encryption, this time from Senator Tom Cotton. Angel posited a simple analogy:

Me: "Hey Tom Cotton Why don't you leave your front door unlocked in case law enforcement needs to get in, if they have a warrent"

Tom Cotton: "Because that would be unsafe, than anyone could just walk in"

Me: "Ohhhh really....."

Next, we've got CanadianByChoice with some thoughts on the true and worrying potential extent of Europe's right to be forgotten:

This won't only be a tool to "silence free speech" and "punish innovation" - it will be a tool to rewrite history. What stops articles about Tiananmen Square or the Holocaust from being removed in the name of the "Right To Be Forgotten"? When we manage to do that (forget history), it's certain that we will repeat it.

Over on the funny side, we've already had our first place comment above, so we'll move straight on to second place, which comes in response to our post about a nineteen-hour "standoff" with law enforcement that ended with officers storming an empty house. Apparently, a hotspot picked up on infrared camera was part of why they thought the house was occupied, leading one anonymous commenter to muse about what really happened:

When questioned if the sun might have created the hot spot in the attic the police responded:

"These cameras pick up hot spots created by hiding humans, thats what they are designed for. There is no way that the hot spots we detected could have been caused by anything other than a gang member hiding. Furthermore at 9am the hot spot was on the east side of the attic but at 4pm it had moved to the west side of the attic. Clearly this was a human moving around in the attic, there is no way that the sun could have caused a hot spot to move!"

For editor's choice on the funny side, we return one last time to our post about Manhattan's DA, where Blaine proposed a novel (if somewhat spiteful) way to send a message about encryption:

These people pushing to ban encryption should set a good example and stop using this evil technology. No encrypted files on their phones, computers or portable drives. No HTTPS for any web sites.

In fact as a trial run how about all tech companies just force HTTP on any connection from a gov owned ip?

This would have a couple benefits.

First, of course, they can show us how a good citizen behaves and that it's completely safe.

Second, FOIA requests would go down, since we could just go get whatever we want.

Win Win

Finally, after AT&T and DirecTV managed to simultaneously raise their rates while claiming they were protecting customers from higher prices, That One Guy suggested we were being a bit hard on them:

I'm not sure where the sarcasm came from in the end there, this is absolutely helping out consumers.

After all if the services were notably different, in price or offerings, think of all the time people would waste trying to decide between the two. With both increasing the prices however, there's no need to think at all, saving countless brain-cells from being put to the test. Whichever you chose, you get hosed, what's not consumer friendly about that?

That's all for this week — and, indeed, this year — folks!

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