Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

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from the parallels dept

This week we have some parallelism between the insightful and funny sides, with both first place comments coming from one post and both second place comments coming from another. What’s more, both first place winners came from the same commenter! First, we head to our look at the various insane claims about the massive DDoS attack, where one commenter insinuated that Hillary Clinton might have had something to do with it — and Michael won first place for insightful by highlighting just how unlikely that seems:

If Clinton had a way to cause a DDoS attack of this magnitude, she probably would have been able to secure an email server.

Next, we head to our post about Hillary Clinton’s campaign needing to own up to the fact that the Wikileaks emails are real, where Thad summed up the campaign’s seeming inability to deal with such revelations:

The Clinton campaign, as it so often does, is making things worse for itself by being stupid. It’s trying to cover up legitimate information, and the coverup always comes across worse than the original actions.

Straight up.

Passing the question along to Clinton in advance is unseemly, but it’s hard to see it as a major scandal. (And I say that as someone who’s furious that the DNC put its finger on the scale for Clinton over Sanders.) Lying about it, on the other hand, just adds to Clinton’s reputation for dishonesty.

After the second debate, when Clinton explained her “public position and private position” comment, a coworker of mine opined that she shouldn’t have acknowledged that she’d really said it, that it would have been better to maintain plausible deniability. I told him that no, in this instance she made the right call, because if she really *did* say it, and then denied it, that doesn’t help her, it makes things worse.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we head to our post about the demotion (which became a resignation) of Copyright Office head Maria Pallante, which of course made pro-copyright lawyers crow about how the creators supposedly hate the change. Two different creators in our comments responded to this — first, Tim R summed up his sentiments:

Vexation without representation

“‘The people in the creative community are furious about the fact that this was done,’ says a lawyer who works for organizations that support strong copyright laws…”

I am a content creator, a musician, a digital artist and a writer. I am also more reasonably versed in copyright than the average bear. I am internet savvy as well, and have a host of tools at my disposal to flex my reasonably ordinary artistic muscles. I don’t possess massive distribution channels, cross-licensing capabilities, or hordes of capital to keep me “lawyered up”.

But I am also not in the minority, and this anonymous legal honk does not speak for me.

Next, Kalean offered an interpretation of the quote:

?The people in the creative community are furious about the fact that this was done,? says a lawyer who works for organizations that support strong copyright laws, ?but especially about the way it was done.?

They’re right. We’re furious that she was demoted instead of fired. We’re especially furious that it wasn’t accompanied by a press release explaining the purpose of copyright.

Over on the funny side, for first place we head back to our post about the DDoS attacks, where Michael took our question about which explanation was stupidest as a challenge:

Online voting is not secure sir, please provide a better way for us to vote. Russia could be influencing this vote with their botnets right now. If only you had not spoken out about SOPA or allowed The Chinese to gain control over IANA and DNS, we could have had the NSA set up secure voting for this.

For second place, we head again to our post about the Clinton campaign’s ongoing denial, where Ninja took a moment to sum up all the complaints about Mike’s stances on issues:

So what have we learned so far from our trolls?

Mike is a anti-copyright Google, Facebook, Microsoft, pro-Trump, pro-Hillary shill, Democrat Republican, baby-eating-Communist left right capitalist shill.

Nothing to do with the article but worth pointing out. Have I forgotten something?

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out on our post about Facebook’s racial targeting and its use by the Trump campaign, where a political debate broke out and soon quotes by “Trump officials” were being thrown around. One commenter rejected these quotes for what one commenter noticed was an extremely ironic reason:

“never take anything said without a name attached to it seriously” – Anonymous Coward

Finally, we head to our post about the Senate’s little snafu in which it summoned the wrong Time Warner to talk about the AT&T merger. Roger Strong supplied an amusing thought that needs no further commentary:

One day, after America is attacked, they’ll approve the invasion of the wrong country.

That’s all for this week, folks!