Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

It's been a while since we've had a double winner, but this week Rekrul took first place for both insightful and funny, in response to the warning from US intelligence agencies that Americans travelling abroad should use burner phones and trust nobody. His response was to note a key omission in this warning:

The video is incomplete! Where's the part where he returns to the US and gets his electronic devices searched and confiscated by the TSA while he's given a thorough groping?

In second place on the insightful side, we've got a response to Google's use of copyright tools to remove extremist content, where we wondered what anyone thinks this will actually accomplish. Almost Anonymous had an answer for us:

The answer is, "something". I know it is not a good answer, but it is the correct one.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start with one more response to the warnings for Americans abroad, this time from OldMugwump who had some hands-on experience:

It's not new, it's just how USG people think

In the 90s I used to go to UN-related meetings in Geneva a lot.

There was always a guy from the State Dept. there to watch over the "US delegation" (most of whom represented private firms).

Every Friday he'd tell us to let State know everywhere we went outside our hotel over the weekend - not for infosec reasons, but because it's a "foreign country" and we could get into all kinds of trouble. We could get arrested and have no rights, not like at home in the US.

This was in Switzerland, the child-proofed chocolate-coated rubber room of Western Europe. Far safer than any place in the US - the main danger was overdosing on cheese.

But I think they really meant it.

There's something about the mentality of people who go to work for the US government - they really, truly, think all them furriners in nasty, terrible places like Switzerland, the UK, Austrialia, Japan (Japan!) are lawless hellholes without Good Old Fashioned Merican Democracy where people will be skinned alive for blinking at the wrong time.

It's a kind of paranoia and fear of the strange.

But it's real, and sincere.

Next, we've got a simple anonymous response to the spike in DUI arrests in Austin since the city banned Uber and similar apps:

do you have any idea how much a city can make off a dui? austin has needs and safety isn't one of them.

Over on the funny side, we've already had our first place comment above, so we move on to second place, with a comment from W4RM4N in response to Microsoft's polite and gentle announcement that it would be screwing over all its Xbox Fitness customers:

I guess that gives a new meaning to "consoled."

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with a response to the Copyright Office's push to require regular renewal of websites' DMCA safe harbor registration. Machin Shin had a solution borrowed from the pro-copyright playbook:

I just had a great idea! They want these registrations to be for a limited time right?

So they should just make them last "life of the creator plus 70 years."

Finally, we've got a response to the worrying news that the EU wants to extend copyright protection to content created by robots and computers. DannyB was shocked to learn that this is a new idea:

Based upon what I see coming out of hollywood, I would assume that we already give copyright to robots?

That's all for this week, folks!