Gizmodo editor's house searched by police last Friday

RAM Hack.

-http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2008/02/researchers-crack-filevault-bitlocker-with-canned-air-hack.ars

You are. basing your opinion from what you have read on Gizmodo? These journalists, and I shall be happy to address them as such, are nothing more than immature punks.

"He wasn't malicious about it.."
When a drunk driver hits and kills someone, I'm sure it wasn't malicious.
When a pick-pocket grabs your wallet, I'm sure the intent is only to enrich themselves, and nothing malicious was meant.
When a journalist buys a piece of technology not meant for release from a source other than the creator, without their consent, the item is considered stolen property with a value not quite obtainable because it's a fucking prototype. Then dismantles it, photographs it, then publishes information about it to the public. No malice intended I'm sure.

I hope he encrypted everything, and they hack the shit out of it. Fuck these assholes. They published and humiliated someone for money. Scumbags the lot, and that's being nice.

Count yourself one of them if you must. I think you are a scumbag too. No malice.

not disputing that apple sits on the board or whatever, but umm...

— John Cook is a senior national reporter/blogger for Yahoo! News.

NOTE: John Cook was previously a blogger at Gawker.com, which is owned by the same company that owns Gizmodo.com.

I didn't realize there were so many legal experts reading TUAW...

This has nothing to do with journalist's rights or legal search warrants. The action taken by the police/state in this issues is totally with out any legal foundation and a clear indicator of how corporations have more legal rights than individual citizens. "Hello officer, I left my cell phone in a bar and i think i found the person online who sold my phone. Will you please begin a criminal investigation issue and issue a search warrant on the persons involved, so i can get my cell back.

I don't get it, why SHOULDN'T he be terminated?

To those who say that the police are on their own for this one and Apple has nothing to do with it; I find that highly unlikely. If the police jumped on everything they heard over the internet that may or may not be illegal, they'd have a 5 year backlog of trying to track down various Anons from 4chan posting CP in hookup threads. The police aren't going to chase after some news story about a device that may or may not be stolen. They need reasonable cause to acquire the search warrant. Meaning that someone would have to report the property as stolen.

Gizmodo claims that the person who found the iPhone did in fact make an effort to return the phone. Gizmodo claims to have bought LOST property, not stolen. They never said they bought stolen property. Because they never admitted it as stolen, it doesn't give the police reasonable cause to acquire a search warrant. Police are very busy people and aren't paid enough to want to go on some wild goose chase for a phone of possibly questionable origin... unless it was reported stolen or Gizmodo admitted it was stolen. The latter is not the case, so the former must be.

Apple most certainly had a role in this. Apple sent a letter to Gizmodo asking for the phone back, and Gizmodo replied that they could, but were kind of jerks about it. Instead of threatening legal action and looking like douches, they probably silently reported the stolen item and used the articles as proof of where it is probaly located. These two in conjunction would give probable cause to obtain the search warrant. (Unless Apple already got the phone back, I'm unsure of this. But if they're trying to get information on Giz's source to press charges, it's basically the same thing)

You need to be fair, Apple isn't some amazing company that can do no wrong. So stop defending them as such.

The result of this is most likely going to end up in a court battle over whether the finder of the phone made sufficient effort to return the phone. Giz will probably win since it's so ambiguous.

Again.... the first step of a criminal investigation is filing a police report. Obviously apple.

Secondly, it's common for the victims of crimes to not press charges. When this happens, the state can still convict. However (save for SERIOUS crimes) most of the time, the state will also drop the charges since the victim wouldn't testify. Theft of a $500 phone isn't serious. You scream TRADE SECRETS WORTH THOUSANDS AND MILLIONS. Trade secrets =/= Patents. And they're not protected like patents or trademarks. Also, if the company doesn't take reasonable means to protect the trade secret, it isn't considered one anymore. Sending an iPhone prototype into the wild and using it while being drunk isn't reasonable means of protecting it. And as an employee of the company, he acted on behalf of the company by not using reasonable means to protect the trade secrets. The phone might have been worth $5000 to Giz because they knew they could quadruple that in ad revenue, but that doesn't mean they thought the item it's self was worth $5000. They spent $5000 on a scoop, not just the device. Opening the device isn't industrial sabotage. It's reverse engineering. Once a product is in the wild, it can be reverse engineered freely without the protection patents recieve from R.E. Also, Giz/Gawker are not technology companies.

From wiki: "trade secret owners who cannot evidence reasonable efforts at protecting confidential information, risk losing the trade secret, even if the information is obtained by competitors ILLEGALY"

That's all.

What would apple have done if they found a competitors prototype phone, would they have just returned it or dissected it first b4 giving it back?

A thought just occured to me...

Back in the day of the ThinkSecret "asteroid" controversy, it was frequently suggested that "asteroid" had been intentionally leaked by Apple specifically to undermine key power players in the rumor industry (Think Secret, PowerPage, Spymac(?), etc...)

Is there anything in particular Gizmodo might have done prior to iPhone prototype thing that would potentially place them on Apple's bad side?

The idea of an Apple-created leaked/sold iPhone prototype would probably be a conspiracy nut's wildest fantasy since Sony's famed "rootkit" music CDs.

Not that I'd put much stock into this one though... Jobs would have to have the RDF cranked up past 11 to even consider something that insane... right?

Just in case, it might be a good idea to loosen up that turtleneck a bit to help cut down on the crazy somewhat... We already have the iPad now... so just relax and breath deeply between keynote speeches, eh steve-o?

This seems a little overly dramatic over a phone. I asked a cop friend of mine about how they respond to cases of lost and stolen phones. They don't. They tell you to get a new one, they don't have time to go chasing after all the lost and stolen phones in the world.

So I told him it was a prototype iPhone. Didn't care. Prototype or not, its just a phone. But he wasn't surprised at the overreaction to the incident when you look at the parties involved.

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