Category Archives: thoughts

Thoughts, musings, etc.

  

Bercovici on 4G-iPhone: Apple could sue Gawker for buying “stolen goods”

DailyFinance’s Jeff Bercovici makes a compelling case that Gizmodo opened itself to criminal and civil penalties by paying someone $5,000 for the “found” iPhone prototype. He argues that California law compelled the finder, and Gizmodo, to make good-faith efforts to find the owner. Gizmodo’s efforts to return the device (before taking it apart and making millions of page hits from it) were at best, lazy and uninterested, and worst, nominal for the sake of covering-their-asses in a legal suit, Bercovici writes:

At heart is the question of whether the person who found the phone made “reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him,” as required by the California penal code. In its account of what happened, Gizmodo says the finder “asked around” the bar where he found it. And after realizing it was an Apple prototype, he called several numbers at the company.

What he never did, however, was notify anyone who worked at the bar, according to its owner, Volcker Staudt. That would have been the simplest way to get the phone back to the Apple employee who lost it, who “called constantly trying to retrieve it” in the days afterward, recalls Volcker. “The guy was pretty hectic about it.”

Nor did the finder report it to the Redwood City Police Department, says Sgt. Dan Mulholland. To be fair, no one from Apple told the police the phone was lost, either. I contacted a company spokeswoman to ask why not but never heard back.

…

And make no mistake: In this case, it was up to Gawker to establish that the seller legally possessed the property. Paul J. Wallin, a founding partner at the California law firm Wallin & Klaritch, offers an analogy. “If you purchase a Rolex watch at a swap meet for $200, a reasonable person would be put on notice that it might be stolen goods,” he says. The buyer would thus be required to take extra measures to determine that it wasn’t.

When I asked Denton what steps his company took to ensure that the seller had, in fact, made a good-faith effort to return the phone to Apple before shopping it around, he redirected the question. “We weren’t convinced the phone was even a genuine prototype until the weekend [ie. after Gizmodo bought and dismantled it],” he said. “And we didn’t discover the name of the Apple engineer who lost it until Monday. We called him and — after Apple officials got back to us — we returned the device to them.”

After further reflection, Bercovici is even more committed in his stance:

I understand the moral calculus they used. We all feel intuitively that picking up something that someone else left behind is not as bad as seizing it by force, stealth or deception. But in the eyes of the law, it’s still stealing. And buying stolen goods is a crime. In those rare cases where a journalist commits a crime and receives the benefit of prosecutorial discretion, it’s usually because he can demonstrate there was a compelling public interest at stake. There is no such interest here. The only parties who benefited from Gizmodo’s story are Gawker Media and Apple’s competitors.

It’s hard for me to pick a horse in this race. I’m a frequent reader of Gawker, though Gizmodo turned me off for awhile with their remotely-tampering-with-CES-displays stunt, and I most definitely read through their iPhone dissection (I also thought Giz had the best iPad app coverage). I think Bercovici is right, but if Giz is the purveyor of stolen info, then I definitely didn’t take the moral high ground by avoiding it.

On the other hand, I hope that if this disclosure can be shown not to have hurt Apple’s bottom line, I hope they ease up on their infamous, and now-tiringly-overdone commitment to secrecy. Not for the sake of its info-hungry fans, but for the workers employed by police-state-like distributors.

See full article from DailyFinance.

  

Apple banned Pulitzer-Prize winning cartoonist’s app because it “ridicules public figures”

Pulitzer-Prize winning cartoonist Mark Fiore, who won this year’s Pulitzer for his editorial cartoons, says he tried to make an iPhone app but it was just too politically hot for Apple’s guidelines. From Nieman Labs (h/t Poynter):

In December, Apple rejected his iPhone app, NewsToons, because, as Apple put it, his satire “ridicules public figures,” a violation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, which bars any apps whose content in “Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”
…
Apple attached screenshots of the offending material, including an image depicting the White House gate crashers interrupting an Obama speech. Two other grabs include images referencing torture, Balloon Boy, and various political issues.


Here’s an “offending image” of Fiore’s.

  

Pultizer Prize at ProPublica

Pulitzer Prize

It’s been a huge last few days for ProPublica. My colleagues Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein unveiled the result of 7+ months of reporting, a much anticipated collaboration with “This American Life” on how the hedge fund Magnetar Capital helped prolong the housing bubble by betting against risky investments that it advocated for. Also, our story on private jet owners hiding in public airspace, uncovered by Michael Grabell (after our lawyers’ successful litigation), was one of our most viewed, thanks to it getting top play by USA Today and Yahoo.

Those both alone would’ve made it one of ProPublica’s most prominent weeks, but then Sheri Fink won the Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting for her massive investigation, published in the NYT magazine, on how a hospital’s doctors, post-Katrina, reportedly put patients to death under the guise of mercy and grace under chaos. Sheri’s win is extremely gratifying, because her subject had a lot of things going against it: Katrina was a four-year-old painful, chaotic memory that most Americans wanted to forget. And for N.O. residents, it seemed that the overwhelming sentiment was for the doctors and other authorities who did what they could. Anna Pou, the doctor at the center of Sheri’s story, had been exonerated (and the prosecutor who went after her was removed). And after Sheri’s story, no new charges have been made against her.

The story itself is a long-read. In addition to the factors above going against it, it also doesn’t deliver an immediate payoff for the ADD-afflicted reader. It’s only until the end that you can appreciate the light that Sheri shed on a universally important, yet opaque topic: who deserves life in a time of crisis? I think Sheri’s story, and subsequent follow-ups related to swine flu preparations, raised the alarm that not even our medical professionals are on the same page, and moved the ball in such a way that her findings would shock even the most cynical skeptics of the medical profession.

Also, congrats to my colleagues Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber for being finalists in the Public Service category for their exposure of California’s broken nursing board. For them to even be considered for that prize, considering they won it recently before in the same area (lax oversight of medical care) is a testament to how thorough their work was again, and how much impact their stories had (Gov. Schwarzenegger immediately sacked or forced out a majority of the board afterwards).

I think our office felt confident our work was as good as any Pulitzer contender and it wouldn’t be a shock to win, even though we would be the first online-only organization (and possibly the youngest, at two years old) to do it. The drama was less about whether if we would win but which one of our reporters would win. For example, T. Christian Miller and his work on defense contractors was, in my mind, as deserving as any. Like Sheri, he shed light, in an exhaustive, dogged fashion, on a subject that most people would rather not care about: the treatment of civilians who are injured in warzones while working as contractors. With the bad rep of Blackwater, it’s proof of T’s herculean reporting and writing efforts that he got lawmakers to make some real moves into an easily overlooked (for political reasons) but essential area of our national security (in terms of prizes though, T already brought home the Selden Ring).

And of course, all those stories above would’ve had a harder hill to climb without the collaboration of all our great editors and research staff. And in my own department, Krista Kjellman and Jeff Larson put in just as much dedication and deliberation to further illuminate the stories in their online presentation (and in the process, often provided research and work important to the stories themselves).

Congrats to the other Pulitzer winners. I haven’t had time to look through all their work. I did put WaPo’s Gene Weingarten’s winning feature on the hellish punishment of parents who left their children to die in overheated cars on my iPad’s Instapaper. I got about a fourth-way through before I had to put it away so I wouldn’t be crying in the subway car.

  

The WikiLeaks Hellfire Video vs. Video Games

The WikiLeaks release of classified U.S. military video depicting American helicopters gunning down Iraqis (which appeared to include children and two Reuters staff) was easily a milestone of modern journalism. Even though Reuters had reported the story aggressively, the deaths of Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were easily forgotten amid the war’s constant newscycle in 2007.

The video below, combined with boots-on-the-ground reporting by WikiLeaks, has an unmatched power to shock, awe, and sicken:

A side-angle to all this is how chillingly-similar the released video is to today’s video games. This was a point Jane Mayer touched on in her excellent New Yorker piece on Obama’s increased usage of Predator drones:

Using joysticks that resemble video-game controls, the reachback operators—who don’t need conventional flight training—sit next to intelligence officers and watch, on large flat-screen monitors, a live video feed from the drone’s camera. From their suburban redoubt, they can turn the plane, zoom in on the landscape below, and decide whether to lock onto a target. A stream of additional “signal” intelligence, sent to Langley by the National Security Agency,* provides electronic means of corroborating that a target has been correctly identified. The White House has delegated trigger authority to C.I.A. officials, including the head of the Counter-Terrorist Center, whose identity remains veiled from the public because the agency has placed him under cover.

People who have seen an air strike live on a monitor described it as both awe-inspiring and horrifying. “You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff,” a former C.I.A. officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th says of one attack. (He watched the carnage on a small monitor in the field.) Human beings running for cover are such a common sight that they have inspired a slang term: “squirters.”

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/26/091026fa_fact_mayer#ixzz0kIeSEK1h

The striking similarity inspired some soul-searching from this Redditor:

After watching the wikileaks video I found myself thinking back to the aerial segments of Modern Warfare and MW2. I’m not sure I’d want to play them again; the anonymity of the people you’re shooting seems a little too true to life for me.

Modern Warfare and MW2 are part of the highly-successful Call of Duty first-person shooter video games. One of the segments has the players manning an AC-130 Spectre gunship to wipe out the enemy:

Some interesting comments from Redditors on that angle:

a_culther0 22 points 9 hours ago[-]
I always believed the main point of those levels in the game was to illustrate that certain things in Modern War can be achieved with the push of a button. The AC-130 level in COD4 has essentially 0 difficulty; which in my eyes makes an excellent statement on its own.
permalinkparentreportreply

awills 15 points 9 hours ago[-]
This is also how I read this scene. It’s actually the most realistic depiction of war in the entire game, because what you’re doing is remarkably similar to what it would be like in real life, just aiming at tiny targets and destroying them. Interestingly, it was also the most distancing from the actual results of your actions.

bumrushtheshow 35 points 9 hours ago[-]
…The grainy TV footage and shooting at tiny people made me question more than usual what the hell I was doing. I was blowing up “bad” people who looked exactly like the “good” people. I was clearly in the “bad” people’s country, with only vague justifications for why I was there blowing the place up.
I’ve seen some awful footage from Apache gun cams on Youtube. Ones where maimed “bad guys” crawl out of a burning truck, while hillbillies say “that one’s still moving, hit ‘im again” left me literally feeling nauseous. I thought of these throughout the AC-130 level in COD4.

  

iPad: First Impressions

iPad at Fat Cat

As if chess at a bar wasn't geeky enough. I think we raised the bar at West Village's Fat Cat.

So I plunked $580 for the 16GB wireless iPad (that includes tax and the Apple case), plus about $60-$80 more on apps. I already have a laptop, a blackberry, and a netbook…but I justified this luxury purchase because I do think that tablet computing (whether or not the iPad leads it) will be the next boom in computer usage, and I’d like to at least be aware of it.

And I like doodling and watching movies in bed.

That said, I didn’t have a strong response for everyone who asked “How is this different than a bigger iPhone?” There’s not much difference, actually, but I think we have yet to see what touch-computing can offer, and it’s a decidedly different experience than a traditional laptop. I’ve owned a MSI Wind for a year now and barely use it, unless I need to pack a laptop when I’m carrying camera equipment around. I’ve already played more games and watched more movies in the past two days on the iPad than I have on my netbook, it just seems better suited for it. I think the lack of a attached keyboard makes for a fundamentally-different experience as least as significant as the iPod Touch (and to some extent, the iPhone) over every other mp3 player before it.

Brushes pic

One of my first attempts on Brushes

I’m not much of an artist, but I’ve always wanted to just sketch for fun without the hassle of buying and maintaining art supplies. A mouse and Illustrator just doesn’t do it for me, nor would a tablet connected to a laptop. Brushes has been one of my favorite apps so far.

I’ve mostly stopped playing video games. I downloaded a few of the marquee titles, including Real Racing, and barely touched them after a few minutes. But the more social, multiplayer games, like Flight Control and the various board games, were really entertaining when the bar we were at, Fat Cat, didn’t have the games we wanted.

As far as productivity…I haven’t used it at all for anything meaningful. When I was sitting around in my living room with both the laptop and iPad, I still, out of habit, switched to my laptop to do even just regular browsing. Typing is a wrist-killer…and touch-navigating the web is still cumbersome.

Didn’t do much reading, but I like that one of the free apps allows you to download classics like Alice in Wonderland for free, with pretty decent, readable text. I still do most of my New York Times reading on my Blackberry as I’m waiting in line or at the subway.

I think I’ll keep the iPad for now…Selling it while people still think it’s cool is still a possibility…but I see a lot of potential in it so far. But I wholeheartedly agree with Kotaku’s Mike Fahey: I feel like an asshole for owning an iPad and don’t feel comfortable using it in public, yet. That kind of reduces the device’s utility…For now, I’m keeping the plastic wrap on it that it came with.

Some other notes:

Cons:

  • I synced up my iPad just now for the first time with my laptop. I took awhile to figure out how to transfer photos from my laptop to the iPad (using the not-so-visible Photos tab in iTunes, and then having to create a special folder on my computer with duplicate copies of photos). And while it was doing that, it decided to delete all the apps from the iPad. The file management on the iPad, as it has been with the iPod, is fucking stupid, and possibly the worst part of any iProduct. I stopped using Sony products because of their proprietary – and generally inferior – formats (a $200 voice recorder I bought years ago is useless because Sony no longer produces/updates the software to access its files). I hope Apple doesn’t go the same path.
  • Apps were generally buggy. Netflix crashed many times.
  • Still haven’t figured out how to comfortably type.
  • Takes awhile to charge up the battery.
  • It’s hard to find a good Chess or Cards game…either they have hotseat-multiplayer or computer AI, rarely both.
  • Yeah, it is a bit heavy to not be resting on your lap.

Pros

  • Touch-interface is as solid as it is on the iPod Touch.
  • Being able to lockdown the screen rotation is great.
  • Lots of decent free apps. My favorite so far are craigsphone (craigslist on the pad), the NYT editor’s choice, Netflix, and Free Books
  • The launch games have been pretty good, including Flight Control, Minigore, Real Racing
  • Netflix streaming on my nightstand is great. Finally, I’ll finish 30 Rock.
  

The Pope as a Manager, part II

Under siege, the Vatican hits back at the New York Times for its coverage of Pope Ratzinger and his past (in)actions as the Church’s doctrinal chief. As I wrote previously, it can’t be much comfort to miracle-believers that the Vatican’s excuse is that crimes most heinous weren’t stopped because the paperwork got lost/ignored in the system.

William J. Levada, the American cardinal who now heads the doctrinal office, had this defense:

Anyone can say, ‘Why didn’t you do this?’ ‘You could have done this better.’ That’s part of life, but certainly it’s not the case to say that he is deficient,” Cardinal Levada said. “If anything, he was the architect of this step forward in the church and I think he deserves his credit.”

I’m not sure what the requirements are to be Pope; the apostle Peter was famously deficient but still made the cut. But it’s hard to blame people for thinking that Ratzinger should’ve shown more moral force than what documents reveal. Levada blames the Father Murphy scandal on the slow actions of the Wisconsin church, but the NYT’s documents argue that it was the Milwaukee bishop who had to tell the Vatican that Murphy’s alleged molesting of 200 boys required more than just prayer and a restriction of sacraments.

Ironically, Ratzinger is credited for being far more aggressive in dealing with the sex abuse crisis than Pope John Paul II; so did JPII, who really was God’s man during the time of the scandal, avoid judgment (he’s currently in running to be a saint) because he passed away in time? The more the Vatican argues that Ratzinger should be commended for taking action, the more it implies that inaction took place under JPII.

  

David Brooks: Maybe Sandra Bullock should’ve stayed in the kitchen

So David Brooks in the NYT, using an almost-current event (Sandra Bullock winning the Oscars, then getting humiliated by hubby Jesse James) takes another (not half-bad) try at an argument that feminists might characterize as “Maybe women would be happier if they focused less on their career and more on their man and family”:

Two things happened to Sandra Bullock this month. First, she won an Academy Award for best actress. Then came the news reports claiming that her husband is an adulterous jerk. So the philosophic question of the day is: Would you take that as a deal? Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow?

Nonetheless, if you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are absolutely crazy. Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being.

To be fair, Brooks doesn’t explicitly focus on wives and their role in gluing a family together, it just happens that Bullock is a woman…but it’s hard to not accuse Brooks of patriarchy when he makes this an either-or situation, as if the only two options for Sandra to choose between are “Win an Oscar” or “Have a faithful husband”…ignoring the fact that it was Jesse James who made a trade between being true to his Oscar-winning wife or bonking some tattooed-bimbo. And, completely ignoring Tiger Woods, who really did choose a world-famous career (and the attendant porn stars that come with it) over his family.

Even aside from that, Brooks’ try at the “money and power isn’t everything” philosophy opened up the conservative Brooks to a zinger, based on a more-currenter-event, from the comments:

B. Starks, Austin, TX: Mr. Brooks, great argument for ensuring health care for all and legalizing gay marriage. I imagine your conservative allies will not see it this way, but the facts noted in the column could be used to shore up both positions, and I hope they are indications you are in favor of both.