Why is he personally offended by this?
I can understand if someone (including me) not really agreeing the way Gizmodo handled this situation, but are you offended by this?
I can understand if someone (including me) not really agreeing the way Gizmodo handled this situation, but are you offended by this?
Sometimes people are offended by what they perceive as injustice or impropriety even when it doesn't directly appear to harm them. You may not be such a person, but I am not surprised they exist.
I'm astounded that they outed the engineer who they claim "lost" the phone. They appear to have taken the word of a law-breaker with a $5,000 incentive to lie that the phone was lost and not stolen, and on that basis they publicly humiliate the engineer. They are either exceedingly cruel or this is an act of misdirection intended to bolster their "defense" that the phone was actually lost and that neither the person who approached them or themselves were able to return the phone promptly.
A very nasty bit of business indeed.
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/OlympicGenderTesti... http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/jul/30/olympicgames2008...
Gruber is a tech journalist. When another person who claims the role of tech journalist acts like a sociopath, it reflects badly on everyone in the profession.
And that's not some abstract philosophical exercise. Gruber's job just got a lot harder. Who among us would trust a journalist now? How many Apple engineers just said a silent prayer and swore to never breathe a word to any journalist, ever? Hell, with guys like this on the loose who needs the legendary wrath of Steve Jobs? I might rather be denounced and fired by Steve Jobs [1] than publicly humiliated in the tech press.
Journalists with ethics need to complain about this loudly and forcefully. Otherwise they will be presumed to be among the journalists without ethics.
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[1] Once the shock wore off, it would be something of an honor to be personally denounced by Steve Jobs. It's not like you wouldn't be in elite company.
The humorous thing is Gruber leaks information about Apple all the time, so it must only be wrong in his mind when you have proof (or well, show the proof). Apple got their hardware back and in the end all that happened was rumors were confirmed. It's an ego hit for Jobs, but he could use a few of those.
What Gruber and a lot of other folks are upset about was the entirely unnecessary outing of the specific engineer who lost the prototype phone.
Gruber retweeted this at 1:41 AM on the 19th, 18 hours before the outing: "Here's an interesting fact: in California, the finder of a lost item is required to tell the police and turn it over to rightful owner."
He called it stolen on his first post about it, just after Gizmodo posted:
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/04/19/gizmodo-rumors
So quite literally since he found out Gizmodo had the device he has been offended by it.
And, honestly, in such a case as this almost anyone is going to have the first reaction along the lines of "this device is almost certainly stolen" no matter how good the purported finder's tale may be...and this one's excuse seems pretty threadbare.
Engadget (apparently) reacted by publishing the photos that accompanied the shady proposal; e.g. they got the story but stayed out of the morass. Gizmodo (again, apparently) reacted by accepting the shady proposal...this is what dismays Gruber who, as someone noted above, is going to be painted with the same (admittedly) broad brush as a result and suffer its consequences, large or small.
Why were Republicans offended by a health plan that was eerily similar to their own plan only a few years back? Why were Democrats offended by that plan originally? They chose sides before and had no choice.
I still think that Gizmodo's abuse of their IP is appalling.
Gruber is the type of guy who is more likely to go by the dictionary definition than popular usage.
While others might find what gizmodo did distasteful, Gruber finds it offensive. When I think about the word "offended", I always think about it something personal that has been directed at you as opposed to your feelings towards something happened to someone you have never met in your life. But again, english is not my first language so it might seem off to me more than a native speaker.