Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the speak-now-or-forever-hold-your-peace dept

This week, our top comment on the insightful side comes in response to FBI boss Chris Wray's invocation of the old "if we could put a man on the moon" argument for encryption backdoors. An anonymous commenter won first place by expanding on the Matt Blaze quote we brought up in response:

"..."if we can put a man on the moon, surely we can put a man on the sun."

Now, THAT analogy is actually quite good for broken cryptography. Backdoored encryption would be very much like putting us ALL on the sun. It CAN be done but with a similarly low projected survival factor.

In second place, we've got an anonymous response to a comment questioning our criticism of the idea that embedding can be infringement by asking if maybe the internet does need fundamental changes:

Sure, the internet could be improved.

Preferably not by people who don't understand how it works.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we've got a pair of responses to Denuvo getting its DRM-cracking nemesis arrested. First it's some anonymous sarcasm:

Where will we find another person with the decades of experience that are necessary to crack Denuvo's copy protection now? Surely there isn't a fundamental flaw with DRM that requires at some point for the data to be decrypted in order for it to be used, meaning that any bright individual with the right tools and technical acumen can see what is happening and work around it.

No, it's the children who are wrong.

Next it's TKnarr with some thoughts about their incentives:

Remember that their plan isn't to protect their DRM against cracking. It's to protect their ability to sell their DRM to game companies. I'd even bet that their financial people see the DRM being cracked as a revenue opportunity: version N of it being cracked means the game companies have to shift to version N+1, which being a major version upgrade requires buying a new license.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous commenter with another take on Chris Wray's encryption comments:

We put a man on the moon, so why can't we make 1+1=3?

In second place, it's Stephen T. Stone with a simple take on Denuvo:

This plan is about as effective as their DRM.

For editor's choice on the funny side, first up we've got an anonymous response to the NYPD's latest failure to document its bad behavior, but it's pretty generally applicable:

'We've tried nothing and are all out of ideas.'
-NYPD

Finally, we've got an anonymous commenter with a solid response to grammar trolls of all stripes:

A language prescriptivist and a language descriptivist walk into a bar.

The descriptivist says "Ow!"

The prescriptivist complains that walking "into" something implies ending up within it, and continues whining about the grammatical inaccuracy while his brain slowly leaks out of his ears from the head injury.

That's all for this week, folks!

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