First things first: an announcement. We’ve decided to take MLK Day off this year, so no more posts until Tuesday! Now, on to the comments…

On the Insightful side, both the first and second place comments come from our post about Carmen Ortiz’s husband criticizing Aaron Swartz’s family. In the lead by a wide margin is Jesse, who drew an interesting comparison:

If US prosecutors are going to blame suicide on cyberbullies like Lori Drew I think it’s only fair to blame judicial bullies like Carmen Ortiz for Swartz’ suicide.

Coming in second is Beta, who had a question for Tom Dolan:

Mr. Dolan stopped short of saying “I’d be willing to go to prison for 6 months for nothing.” I’d very much like to ask him –in a public forum– whether he would object to such an arrangement for one of his children.

For the first Editor’s Choice, we go to one of our posts analyzing the charges against Aaron Swartz. Kenneth Michaels helped to put Swartz’s actions at MIT in perspective:

What I find troubling is that the common practice of wireless “trouble shooting” is turned into evidence of a crime.

One explanation for why Arron changed his MAC address (without criminal intent) is that he was trying to figure out WHY he was kicked off the network. When your computer doesn’t connect, you jog it into requesting another IP address. Problem solved! When you can’t connect again, you say “hmmm, what is going on.” You request another IP address, but that doesn’t work. You ask, “is it a wireless policy because I’m hogging wireless bandwidth?” You then change your mac address. You connect. You conclude, “ah, it is a wireless policy, I’m hogging the bandwidth and MIT doesn’t want that; I’ll just use the wired connection in the closet.” You connect in the closet but you don’t want people messing with your laptop (or stealing it), so you cover it.

What was “trouble shooting” turns into evidence of criminal conduct. Be careful next time you try to trouble shoot a network connection.

The second Editor’s Choice is a short, sweet, highly quotable comment from an Anonymous Coward, inspired by the early details of Kim Dotcom’s Mega service:

encryption is the peoples DRM

On the Funny side, the first place comment comes from our post about the DOJ’s hilariously over-redacted response to a FOIA request from the ACLU. One commenter suggested the ACLU should fax it straight back to them, but MonkeyFracasJr chimed in with an even better idea:

I’d tape the pages in a loop around the document feeder and fax it back to them …

Only a few votes behind, we have a comment from our post about the latest example of shifty Hollywood accounting. In response to a commenter who wondered how the studios don’t run into tax problems with these practices, jupiterkansas suggested a possibility:

They pay their taxes directly to the candidates.

For Editor’s Choice on the Funny side, we’re going to run with the theme of crazily redacted documents from the government, since we actually had more than one story in that vein. First up, going back to the post about the DOJ’s response to the ACLU, we’ve got an anonymous commenter who couldn’t ignore how brazenly insulting the DOJ’s move was:

For all the things you may complain the government gets wrong, trolling is not one of them

Separately, we also had a post about the EFF’s ongoing efforts to learn more about the FISA spying law, the latest of which netted them (you guessed it) an almost-entirely redacted document supposedly outlining the secret interpretation of the law. Another anonymous commenter elegantly summed up the absurdity of the situation:

The only secret that they didn’t keep secret is the fact that theyre keeping the secret a secret.

That’s true but, shh! It’s a secret!

Once again, we’re taking Monday off—see you Tuesday, folks!

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