Struggling against the almighty tides of eventuality

I’ve had a mishmash of thoughts today, so, what better place to toss them than a blog no one reads? Sure, why not!

First off: Free Comic Book Day was today, and it was fine. I went to Amazing Spiral in the Rotunda shopping center and picked up a couple of trade paperbacks (The Sandman vol. 6: “Fables and Reflections“, and Cable and Deadpool vol. 6: “Separation Anxiety“). While The Sandman series strikes me more like a heady novel-type read, the Cable and Deadpool has already been consumed as “lighter” fare, and was delicious. I know the sacrifice at the end has been undone via comic book magic but it was still pretty poignant, and the balance of the book was pretty hilarious. Still have yet to start the other one.

I picked up a couple of freebies too: War of the Supermen and Thor #1 (I think the second one the guy just threw in cause he was nice, not cause it was meant to be free). I’ve never been big on Norse mythology, and Marvel’s watered-down version certainly doesn’t make me leap for joy, but Thor #1 definitely makes me want to read more of this. Fortunately, it’s a year or two old, so I already can!

Second off: I got in a debate with someone over Steve Jobs’s recent “open letter” on Flash. She lauded him for standing firm on “this controversial issue.” Of course, it ain’t exactly health care and human rights we’re talking about here. It’s about an asshole sitting on top of a mountain of money and guarding it like a rabid Doberman. At any rate, he’s being douchey and claiming to be only acting in the best interests of consumers everywhere.

Hey Steve: shove your concerned protection, please. Thanks.

I don’t think, with a five-minute review process, that any app gets the entirety of its code checked for all possible security threat vectors, nor do I think it’s fully put through its paces to make sure it doesn’t crash (I use a couple relatively “popular” apps that crash all the fucking time). 3D games, lauded on the system, are complete energy whores. At no point does he acknowledge that his “it’s buggy and crash-happy” (paraphrased) argument holds water only when you admit that the entire ecosystem is built around such buggy, crash-happy, energy-sucking apps, mixed in with an overwhelming pile of shitty flashlight and fart apps. You’ve got a few gems, like Foursquare, but a lot of that 100,000+ library is pretty terrible. Anyway, I like my internet with Homestar Runner, and why the fuck do you think I need to be protected from what I want in the first place?

Oh yeah, that’s right, cause you’re a self-centered whiny little bitch. Adobe has been getting smacked around by your financial muscle, strong-armed by a skinny black-turtle-necked jackass who used them up and now that he’s done with them, is posting all the nude photos for everyone to laugh at. Yes, even the one with the bunny ears. Especially the one with the bunny ears. Like I said with the bullshit about Gizmodo, they’re allowed to be just as douchey as the market allows them to be with regards to their closed ecosystem and completely arbitrary approval process, but the key word, underlined and bolded for your convenience, is douchey. This is why I hate those guys, and that’s not even getting into how they’re playing at being Magnum P.I. and trying to go around the police (who are already banging down doors in a highly-suspect potentially-illegal action for them). They’re assholes through and through. The only argument that jumps out at me as logical in the whole tirade was “flash was designed for mice,” and even then it doesn’t have to use that idiom, it just does right now. It’s all preference, and Steve Jobs, in classic “I have the best brain ever, BOOM” douchebag fashion, is cramming his down everyone else’s throats.

Third, and finally, off: I think I’ve figured out what I want to call this blog. It references the blog post I wrote several months ago when I was just starting out. It’s part of a quote I feel really proud of, and that’s what I’d really like this blog to be about: writing I can later look back on and hopefully, for the most part, be proud of. Not all of it will be, of course, as I’ll probably look back on this post later and the inevitable back-and-forth about how justified Apple is in doing whatever it damn well pleases, or that maybe Deadpool is a lot more “deep” than I gave him credit for (anybody?!), and regret that I ever said anything.

Whatever.

The new title of the blog, in case you’re curious (and also stupid, cause it’s now in the header) is “An Oak In The Fall.”

Welcome.

So, my blog went down for a few days. Dreamhost’s automatic scanning script detected something wrong, and disabled it. All I got in the error message was a warning to update all of my software/plugins (which everything was, except for two plugins that went out of date while the site was down), and to check the server-side code for malicious modifications. Despite WordPress being a giant hideous PHP beast, I went through it yesterday, and everything looked just about like I’d expect. I think it was triggered because I had an unencrypted/uncompressed backup copy in a subdirectory with a much older version of WordPress. I’m not sure if it was accessible, but I deleted it anyway to prevent future occurrences.

Moving on.

So, Gizmodo is apparently made up of jackasses. As anyone who’s read this is already well aware, they somehow acquired a next-generation iPhone prototype. As we all know, Apple’s ass is squeezed so tight even radio signals can’t get out, so it’s clear that Gizmodo having the device in the first place wasn’t very much on the up and up. That much was clear as soon as I read the original article.

However, they then upped their jack-assery by outing the Apple engineer whose phone it was. Now, don’t get me wrong: I have no doubt that eventually Apple was going to get their hardware back, and a simple serial number check would tell them to whom they gave it. His life at Apple, likely, was ended. That sucks for him, cause people who work at Apple tend to like it, in spite of the draconian restrictions on talking to anyone about what you do (I know people who work at NSA who are allowed to talk more about what they do for a living). Of course, that much was his own fault.

The problem for me, though, is that all of that is an internal Apple affair. In no way was it journalism to out a guy that was about to get canned. It might be a human-interest story about how evil Apple is that they’d fire someone for losing a prototype; but that might happen at any company, it’s just that much more certain at Apple. And that argument is even flawed, because if Gizmodo had simply been up front with Apple and returned the device, there might not have even been an issue. The human-interest argument, broken as it clearly is, also assumes that they were doing it for some sort of altruistic purpose.

They weren’t.

Reading through their repeated posts, it sounds like they’re trying to be funny while fingering the guy. Let me clue you in, Gizmodo: Apple isn’t going to say “well, clearly it’s this guy’s fault so we’ll just let it slide.” The whole thing reads like the following story: a nerdy guy is encouraged by his smooth-talking friends to steal his dad’s porno stash so they can all beat off in the tool shed later; the nerdy guy gets caught; the smooth-talking friends say, while snickering, “Well, shucks, Mr. Jobs, poor old Gray just made a mistake any of us could make, if we were trying to STEAL PORN MAGS TO BEAT OFF, golly goshes.” They act smugly about the entire affair, but the problem is that this wasn’t some small-time misunderstanding, and Steve Jobs doesn’t seem like the kindly hearted dad-next-door who doesn’t want to spank you with the full force of Johnny Law.

I do not like Apple’s methods of locking down all their research, the entire environment of their computers/devices, or much of anything about Apple (aside from the physical appearance and software stability of their computers, which you have to admit is sexy). However, it’s their prerogative. As a consumer, the only way you get to vote on this is with your dollars. They don’t do anything wrong legally by walling off their ecosystem, and it’s not a bout of journalistic prudence to crack open an illicitly-acquired prototype. It’s potential theft and destruction of property charges. And as much as I dislike Apple, and would relish the opportunity to know what the next iteration of their software/hardware does with out the “Apple Event” Steve Jobs/media circle jerk, it’s the way they do things, and the way they’re allowed to do things.

I’m not sure what the statutes will say about any of this legally, since the device has now been returned to Apple without invoking any law enforcement thus far. However, Apple has (to my estimation) the following possible recourses:

• Do Nothing – Unlikely, to me. They rely on extreme secrecy, and if a breach of that secrecy goes unpunished, other people will be willing to say “screw it” in the future.
• Cockblock Gizmodo – This seems almost a given. While other media outlets are invited to the Apple Events to get first cracks at live-blogging/tweeting new hardware and software releases, Gizmodo may have to sit outside in the rain and wait for scraps in the trash can left over from more favored pets. Note that the following options are still available in conjunction with this one.
• Red Tape – Assuming there’s nothing that Apple can eventually legally do, they can still squash Gizmodo with long-term legal problems, overmatching them with a legal team big enough to staff an aircraft carrier, as big corporations are known for having, tying them up until their funds completely dry up and they collapse.
• Lawsuit – Like the previous one, but successful: assuming they can prove that they lost R&D money, or eventual sales due to less impact at their eventually unveiling, or anything resulting from a yet-to-be-proven-illegal “transaction” (read: theft) of a prototype, that could land Gizmodo in spicy legal waters which could prove disastrous: from major fines all the way up to jail time.

I do not like being on Apple’s side on this. If it had stopped at “they published a story which damages Apple’s bottom line,” I’d wince and look away, feeling badly as they were eviscerated and/or annihilated at Cupertino’s hands; I might even write an objection at Apple’s shitty tactics (I did say I don’t like them). But the arrogance and flippant way in which they tossed the engineer’s name out there, while still protecting the guy who sold them the phone “as a source,” like they were some sort of legitimate news organization that just happened to act like guilty 15-year-olds, makes me hope for the worst.

Having spent a decent portion of today talking about programming with rakaur and dKingston, I feel I have the urge to actually do some programming.  I do that for my job, of course, but that’s not really what I’m talking about.  I’ve been doing that all day today, and while it’s nice to get a task done, writing database interfaces for government processes isn’t exactly illustrious.  I don’t hate my job, though the people I work with can be, shall we say, frustrating; I just want to do something other than this.

Recently, I went off the deep end and acquired an iPhone, which I’m almost certain heralds the apocalypse in some way.  However, it presents an interesting opportunity: I could learn another language and actually write some interesting things.  I’m assuming the ideas for those things will come later, after the learning part.  The more important thing is to actually do something new, while I have the vibe for it.

Also, I never posted those things I promised I would a week or two ago.  Turns out, I had no Internet connection.  Of course, now I’ve totally lost interest in them.  One’s written up, but it’s terrible, so I guess I’ll post it, and just trash the other.