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Apple Lawyering Up On "Fake Steve Jobs"
An anonymous reader sends us to The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs for a developing situation. Daniel Lyons, a.k.a. Fake Steve Jobs, made a post earlier today revealing that Apple was offering him some money (in the wake of the ThinkSecret shutdown) to close down his blog. He said he was interested in taking it. A few hours later, Lyons posted again revealing that Apple's lawyers had contacted him angrily, saying the details of the deal were supposed to remain private. Fake Steve replied 'we either deal out in the open, completely transparently, or we don't deal.' A third post gives details of Apple's lawyers' next response, going totally medieval on him. Since then the situation has calmed down a bit.
It could just be a satirical fiction based around the ThinkSecret situation.
I'm always confused by Apple on matters like this; a lot of these people are key in building & maintaining hype in Apple products. If Apple (apple legal?) had their way, it seems like there'd be... well... Apple.com and a few keynotes every year as the only way people would learn details of (and think of?) new products.
I'm a big Apple fan & I love their approach of using/contributing to open source software where it makes sense to improve their products - but their marketing and PR people seem at odds with their engineering attitude (especially with their solution-oriented attitude recently with iPhone, Apple TV compared to their key skill as a superb platform (NB. this point was blatantly stolen from Wil Shipley's blog)). I know PR people think about things completely differently from engineers but you'd think that was a company attitude, not just with the people making the magic
Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"
This would be the same Dan Lyons that faked a take-down note from Apple in order to stop writing Fake Steve Jobs before his management found out about it. He didn't want his management to know because technically he was violating his contract with Forbes, but fortunately for him they didn't mind.
Not exactly a paragon of virtue himself... and not above conducting business in public when it suits him, and in private when he can get away with it.
This guy also thought SCO was a sure winner and wasn't very polite about the Linux community.
C'mon people, think! It's the FAKE Steve Jobs blog. Did it occur to you that the stories there might be FAKE? This is satire, and you're all fools.
Do you really believe that? Parts of this hoax were believable, but the EFF part was obviously a joke.
(1) Even Apple's lawyers don't just whip out kid's college fund numbers.
(2) The EFF would never say that.
(3) If Lyons has a contract to continue the blog, then his employer would most certainly be fielding the lawyers, because if anything were actionable, they'd be liable too. (duh) So his "I've already paid a ton for a lawyer" was another giveaway.
What's hilarious is that Real Steve Jobs (or at least someone acting on his behalf) took the time to reply to a few angry readers who emailed him.
Nice posts though. FSJ rocks.
I think Fake Steve Jobs has stepped over the line from hilarious satire to nasty slander. Libel? Whichever.
If it's a joke, which it appears to be, I think Apple would be completely justified in going after him.
Parody is a right that comes with responsibility like any other. When you step out of character on your parody blog and say you're being sued, and give nasty details, if you're lying that's not parody anymore, it's just lying.
Shame on the lot of you. This is supposed to be a smart crowd here. Don't let your bias get to the point where you just look foolish. It's xmas, it's the weekend, but Apple lawyers are firing off quick replies that are increasingly brutal despite their previous emails all going directly public via FSJ? Come on, nerds, use your brains.
It appears, from various comments above, that this is a joke by Daniel Lyons, in very poor taste. Given how widely Slashdot is read, I think there should be a prominent clarification in the headline and story, IMMEDIATELY, that the story is dubious.
Apple does enough things that genuinely warrant criticism. Inventing a story like this, and publicising it as fact, is unconscionable.
...and it's not even April.
Not only has he baited those of us who read the FSJ blog, but he has also baited every Microsoft fanboy and Apple fanboy who read his blog, who don't read his blog, and now Slashdot.
If the Internet ever gave out trophies, this guy deserves at least 5. Maybe 6.
I am constantly amazed with the people who flock to Apple when they do the same thing at the hardware level that Microsoft does at the software level and that is product line lock in.
Really? I run Mac OS X and Windows XP on my Mac, and if I wanted to I could have my pick of Linux or BSD variants that work on Intel on my Mac.
And since my iMac is really nothing but a glorified Intel-based laptop on a stand, I'm not exactly sure what part of the hardware locks me in. Perhaps it's these proprietary USB and Firewire ports on the back that only allow me to attach Apple-only peripherals. Perhaps it's the built in Pioneer DVD-RW that Apple nicknames the "Superdrive" that allows me to only burn on Apple branded discs to Apple-only formats. (If only I could manage to read ISO files, perhaps even go as far as to mount them as a new drive when I double clicked on them). If only Steve Jobs wasn't such a channel-controlling, OEM bullying monopolistic control freak...
Humans are simple creatures, we need the world defined in goodies and baddies, that often means having to make the choice of the lesser of two evils, and not always getting it right.
Godwin time perhaps, in WW2 who are the goodies and who are the baddies? You have the axis and the allies. Well Japan and Germany clearly belong in the baddies groups, these are evil nations whose people have not a single redeeming quality. The role of Italy and and Austria is slightly more complex. Italy often seems to be able to shrug of the worsed of the holocaust.
But the goodies? The US of A? Hitler went to the east for lebensraum, the americans trekked to the west and killed the people already living there. What is the difference between a sign that says "Geine Juden" and "No Blacks"?
England? Talk about a country bend on taking over the world, it made an empire out of astraucities. The soviet union/russia? Well at least Stalin could never be called a racist, he had entire populations wiped out of all sorts. Equality of a kind I suppose.
Yet we must pick and in popular culture that often means we gloss over the "truth" to present one side in a better light. You might have noticed that in the recent WW2 tv series Band of Brothers absolutly no mentions is made of the US army policies regarding blacks or those with ancestors from Japan?
Part of the final solution was to deport jews to remote areas where they could be controlled/wiped out. Explain to me the motivations between Indian reservations and the rather diminsied population figures of native americans?
In WW2 there were only baddies, just that some at that particulair time were not as active as others and depending on your own background some weren't intrested in being very bad to you at that moment. Why string up a jew when blacks are so much more fun?
Yet we need to have a hero, and so we make one, by putting on blinders.
Steve Jobs is a figure in IT, there are many others, but he can be very closely linked to Bill Gates, an obvious baddy (although once seen as a hero freeing us from the evil IBM, a company that is now often seen as a goodie).
What really is the difference between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates apart from income? It is a well known part of computer history that it was Steve Jobs own (what is the word, incompetence, arrogance) that handed Bill Gates the PC market. Apple, IBM, Commodore, Atari etc etc all screwed up at a crucial point leaving Wintel to rule the market. A lot has been written about it already, including on slashdot.
But just imagine that Steve Jobs hadn't made what ever mistake it was he made and that Apple had come to rule the PC market, what then? Would it have been any better? Imagine that the holocaust had never happened, would the US be the evil country for its treatment of blacks, would it have continued like South Africa? How much did the realization of the holocaust change american opinion on its own treatment of a part of the population?
Apple has never been any more open with its software then Microsoft has. While MS software has always been bug prone, I have to say that the most crashy PC I have ever seen was running OS9. Supporting DRM, are we talking about Steve "Disney" Jobs here? Sony is often a villain when it comes to consumer rights, but when did Apple ever fight a legal battle FOR fair use?
But we need a hero, and so we make one, reality be damned. The sad part is that we got real heroes in IT, Stallman in front, but that person is WAY to much of a hero. People often insultingly try to compare him to Jezus but I personally see that as a rather important clue as to real heroes who truly stand for something. The person of jezus, if he was real, was a real pain in the ass for the powers that be, even his own followers. Really read the bible and you find a guy who was kicking against a lot of pedastals and upsetting people. Very confenient he was killed and that the pleps couldn't read and that the powers that be could tell their people what Jezus had RE
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.