Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the laughter-is-the-best-medicine.-also-the-polio-vaccine dept

It was hard not to laugh this week when the MPAA, during the act of banning Google Glass from movie theaters, claimed it had a long history of welcoming technological advances. But despite how funny that was, it actually gave rise to our most insightful comment of the week, from an anonymous commenter pointing out a whole other ridiculous inconsistency in the MPAA’s position:

So an industry that thinks a blue ray is so much better than a DVD that people will pay money to replace their DVDs with blue rays, also thinks that a cam of a film with enough wobble to cause motions sickness will destroy their sales. Makes perfect sense to me.
/s

I’ll be honest — some of the details of our second most insightful comment of the week flew a little over my head. But the message is clear and interesting: according to sigalrm, there’s a significant chance that mobile ISP Cricket’s blocking of encrypted emails was the result of a relatively common error, not a nefarious choice:

“inspect esmtp” is the default setting for Cisco ASA Firewalls across at least the 7.x, 8.x, and 9.x code trains, and causes exactly this behavior. It’s a single line in what is generally a very large config file, buried near to the end of the config, trivial to overlook, and generally a pain in the ass.

To make things even better, “inspect esmtp”‘s functionality is further obfuscated by the fact that most “inspect xyz” commands on the ASA actually allow for proper handling/operation of protocols that require special treatment – packet manipulation to deal with nat/pat, firewall pinholing, etc. Examples of protocols requiring inspection for proper operation on the ASA platform include, but are not limited to, netbios, sunrpc, sip, h323, etc.

Nothing about “inspect esmtp” _or_ it’s location in the ASA configuration file implies “break critical esmtp functionality”

Unless/until you’ve been bitten by this, most people firewall administrators don’t know to look for it, and the reaction I’ve seen from most people when they find the solution is along the lines of “damnit cisco…”

Frankly, having deployed a fair number of Cisco ASA’s myself, this sounds more like a missed configuration setting followed by an “oh crap” moment on a new deployment than a malicious “let’s break encrypted email” conspiracy.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start with a comment from Rich Kulawiec, responding to Senator Burr’s concerns that information in the CIA Torture Report could “potentially cause the losses of life to Americans”:

Other things that potentially cause the losses [sic] of life to Americans:

Interstate highways
Cigarettes
Guns
Furniture [1]
Obesity
Swimming pools
Inadequate medical care
Motorcycles
Football
Flu
Police officers
and so on.

If the criteria for decision-making are that all outcomes which might possibly result in an American death are disallowed, then no possible decisions can be made. Ever.

[1] Americans Are as Likely to Be Killed by Their Own Furniture as by Terrorism – Micah Zenko – The Atlantic

Next, we’ve got a quick note from silverscarcat on one of this week’s DailyDirt posts, reminding us of an important day in the histories of both medicine and intellectual property:

Just a FYI to everyone…

Today is the day, 100 years ago, Jonas Stalk was born.

In 1955, he discovered the cure to Polio, but chose to not patent it, allowing everyone easy access to the cure.

Had he patented it, he may have made over 7 billion dollars in his lifetime.

Over on the funny side, we start with a response to Eric Holder’s apology about the not-so-funny act of lying to a judge, in which he claimed the law made him do it. Vidiot won first place by offering some sympathy for his plight:

Hey… it happens

I know a guy who was forced to lie to the court, saying he didn’t rob that bank… all because of a stupid statute which says you can’t rob banks. Totally sympathize with Holder.

For second place, we head to the news that the FTC has fined an online dating site for its fake profiles. BentFranklin latched on to the funniest phrase to emerge from the whole ordeal, “Virtual Cupid”:

There once was a Virtual Cupid
Arousing our male members’ group id,
With bosoms enticing
At premium pricing,
We truly can say “I’m With Stupid“.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with one more response to the MPAA’s hilarious claim about welcoming new technology. Chris-Mouse decided to frame it as a lie of omission:

They just forgot to mention that they have a history of welcoming technological advances with torches and pitchforks.

And finally, after the somewhat disturbing news that the White House didn’t find out it was hacked until another country let them know, Blaine offered some security advice:

Maybe the White House should hire an outside expert?

I hear there’s some Keith Alexander guy that’s has some new magic security technology that he came up with all on his own…. but he doesn’t come cheap.

That’s all for this week, folks!