Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the say-it-again dept
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is dfbomb with a comment about the insane charges being brought against adults who assist students during anti-ICE protests:
These fucking assholes terrorized our schools.
They approached our people observing schools during morning and afternoon drop offs, pretending to be locals. We saw through them.
They staged next to Liam’s school just to be intimidating. They staged at my kid’s school.
These fucking ICE roared through the back alleys of family neighborhoods at 50mph with garages less than 6 inches on either side of their giant rented SUV mirrors, which had stolen license plates on them. They did this to try to lose observers.
They terrorized Roosevelt school after Renee was shot, just to assert dominance after the shooting in the neighborhood.
Fuck ICE. Charge me you assholes. See you in court where I tell the stories of how ICE agents have threatened, beaten and harassed my neighbors and I. The stories of how they cried in their coffees each morning because their feelings were hurt everyone hated their NAZI bullshit.
Mike, I wonder if Ken White would take the case if I managed to be perp-walked with middle fingers akimbo?
Fuck ICE. Fuck this ethnic cleansing and flex of power in defense of ethnic cleansing.
NAZI PUNKS: FUCK OFF.
In second place, it’s Rocky with a reply to a comment that aimed to dismiss expert opinions on age verification technology on the basis of some dubious claims about expert opinions on past issues:
Which experts? Have you actually educated yourself on what happened and when?
This is the sequence of events:
1. Hunter Biden (unverified) drops off a laptop for repair
2. No one comes to pick up the laptop for months
3. The owner of the repair shop starts tinkering with the laptop and pieces together a copy of the hard drive
4. The owner peruses the content, then tries to fob it off to various republicans
5. The owner also sends a copy to the FBI
6. A copy of the drive is passed around among Republicans and gets altered and modified several times
7. It finally ends up with Rudy Giuliani who sends a copy to the New York Post
8. NYP posts a story about the contents but no one at the paper wants to put their name on the byline
9. Links to the NYP story is posted on social media
10. Some links to the story is then removed on social media under the rule “hacked material”
11. A bunch of butthurt idiots scream censorship because surfing to the NYP article is impossible, only links on social media can work!
12. Social media companies walk back the decision to remove links.
13. After a lot wailing and gnashing copies of the drive eventually ends up with people that has knowledge of computer forensics
14. All examinations of the copies say some of the content appear to be authentic but there are signs of tampering and other content added, but no one can determine if the drive actually comes from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden
15. Mac Isaac, the repair shop owner, finally approaches CBS News with a “clean copy” because he didn’t like lies being flung around about the “Hunter Biden Laptop”. This drive is examined by a reputable third party which determines that the drive in all likelihood comes from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden
16. That’s it.So these 51 experts you mentioned, did they examine the clean copy or the tampered copies?
“Hundreds of doctors and scientists wrote that covid obviously came from bats in a wet market“
No, what most said was that the virus in all likelihood came from bats that spread it to other animals which in turn ended up in the wet market. Do you understand the concept of zoonotic spillover and how bats are often carriers of very nasty viruses.
“But lol, no one cares about “letters from experts”. They probably never did, but they SURE AF don’t now.“
Willful stupidity is ignoring what knowledgeable people say. The right course of action is to listen, then actually determine if what they say is correct which may require people to learn new things that can contradict their beliefs. The latter makes the lotus eaters uncomfortable, because the apathy of belief is such a comfort in a complicated world.
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a pair of comments about the dangers of losing Section 230, both replying to claims that 230 is just a gift to the internet giants. First, it’s MrWilson responding to the idea that startups competing in the social media space is already impossible:
You seem stuck in a perspective that the purpose of every social media platform is to become as popular as Facebook has been at its peak. Alternative platforms are often niche ones that aren’t interested in becoming that popular and statistically can’t because their target audience either isn’t large or doesn’t grow much.
They deserve to survive despite your lack of imagination in how these attacks could affect them.
Next, it’s blakestacey on the protections more generally:
The law doesn’t just apply to billion-dollar companies. It protects Wikipedia. It protects Bluesky. It protects Dreamwidth. It protects individual Mastodon instances. It protects TechDirt. It protects personal blogs. It protects you.
Acting as though the Internet is synonymous with two or three giant corporations is an excellent way to get laws and rulings that only giant corporations have the resources to survive. Zuckerberg, Musk and the Ellison family win, while you and I lose.
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is HT Pythons with a comment about Trump’s defamation lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch being tossed out:
Into The Pit
What is your name?
- Donald Trump
What is your quest?
- To seek $10 billion dollars
What is the definition of actual malice?
- Huh? I don’t know that. (whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…..)
In second place, it’s Pixelation proposing a new multi-purpose maxim:
“For every human problem there is a Trump solution — one that is direct, obvious, and wrong.”
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with one more comment from Pixelation, this time about RFK Jr.’s recently-announced podcast:
He should name his podcast, As The Worm Turns.
Finally, it’s Strawb with a comment on our post about the Trump phone, in which we referred to Trump’s organization as “fraud-prone”:
Which, in this case, would make them the fraud-phone Trump organization.
That’s all for this week, folks!
Comments on “Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt”
About Rocky's comment on the Biden laptop
Rocky’s summed it pretty well: complete lack of a chain of custody combined with a complete lack of any sensible forensic procedures makes it nearly impossible to discern what’s real and what isn’t.
Let me add my own perspective on this — working from the opposite direction. Suppose you come into my office and put a laptop on my desk and tell me “This is Epstein’s laptop”. What do you think I do with it? I may have just been handed evidence that will destroy some very evil people, so what do I think I do with it?
I do nothing with it. I don’t touch it. I shoo that person out of my office, I put a cover over the laptop, and I call my attorney. I ask my attorney to get two more attorneys NOT at his firm. And then I call the company I know that has expertise in DNA and fingerprints and other physical forensics, and then I call the certified video recording company, and then I do more nothing with that laptop until all of those people are present.
And then — with multiple witnesses present, video recording in process, etc. — the physical forensics people do their thing — on the outside of the laptop case, on the keyboard, on the screen. And then they take it apart and repeat with everything inside, and that includes removing the hard drive and RAM so they can be individually checked.
Note well: at no point have I said anything in the same zip code with “boot up the laptop and poke around” because of course not. That would modify the contents of the drive and that’s spoliation of evidence. When it’s finally time to look at the drive, I get at least two more forensic IT people, and again on video with multiple attorneys as witnesses, we plug it into an external harness and make multiple bit-for-bit copies that are checked against each other and checksummed so that we can verify that those copies are accurate. And then…
You get the idea. Every step is witnessed by multiple people, every step is documented, every step is done in a way that preserves evidence.
Compare and contrast with Rocky’s account of what happened with the Biden laptop: that was a clown show. If I were one of the people on that list, I could have easily fabricated any evidence I wanted to and left it for the next person to find and blab about on Fox News and Musk’s Nazi bar and whatever, because nobody would be clueful enough to realize they’d been played.
TL;DR: Serious people do serious things with serious evidence.
Re: Come on now
You’ve spent far too much time reading crime novels.
No average person is going to run (and pay for) their own private investigators and investigation when they are handed potential evidence of a crime.
Their most likely course of action will be to contact the relevant authorities and say, “I’ve got this evidence here” and turn it over the the professionals.
Re: Re: Assuming a lot
Given the detailed description of procedure, I think you’re making a very shaky assumption that the Anonymous Coward is an ‘average person’ in this field. I think they’re much more likely to be ‘relevant authorities’-adjacent, so have a much better grasp upon chain-of-custody and rules of evidence handling than you do.
Re: Re: Re:
Well, there are do’s and don’ts’s. If someone is handed potential evidence, don’t muck around with it and instead just deliver it to the relevant authorities.
In this case, remember that FBI supposedly got a “clean copy” very early on and didn’t find anything they would consider actionable then. It wasn’t until much later that verified information from that copy was used to prosecute Hunter Biden for various tax related crimes (in conjunction with leaked information from the IRS) and the illegal possession of a gun.
Re: Re: Re:
On the contrary, you’re making a shaky assumption that the person involved is not “average”.
There was nothing said about this fellow being a lawyer or someone occupying any kind of an official position.
“If you walked into my office…” tells you nothing other than that he has an office.
In the context of his post, the most likely conclusion is that he’s referring to a department manager’s office in a computer sales shop, not a police station.
Re: Re: Re:2 Assume away
The AC’s comments jibe with my own training on the subject, so you can take your assumptions and stuff ’em where the sun don’t shine.
Re: Re: Re:3
Thank you for your valuable contribution to the discussion.
Ain’t no denying your sharp intellect.
Re: Re:
“No average person is going to run (and pay for) their own private investigators and investigation when they are handed potential evidence of a crime.”
Bluesky feed seems to be down
Last post is
Nintendo’s Haphazard ‘Mario Maker 2’ Takedown Process Rife With Abuse
3 days ago
Once more with feeling: Fuck ICE.
Re: No thanks
No thanks; there’s no telling what disease I might catch!!
Re: Re:
Ah, I see, a non-native. Let me explain local culture and language:
Much like a Hawaiian “Aloha”, in Minnesotan “Fuck ICE” is both “hello” and “goodbye.”
Re: to be said
Chilling, Very chilling