I just read about three bisexual men who were disqualified from playing in the Gay Softball World Series because they were not deemed to be "Gay enough." I was offended.
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.
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.
He has a very strong personal attachment to Apple and it looks like he thinks Apple was wronged. I don't really understand cheerleading a $230b company to prosecute a blogger for photographing and returning a phone lost in public, but he's not alone in that. People take Apple personally.
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.
Gruber is not offended about the phone leak. Gizmodo's analysis of the phone hardware they obtained is legitimate, even though their methods in obtaining said hardware are shady-to-illegal.
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.
That's not true, he was offended well before they outed the engineer. He actually never even mentioned the outing in the OP.
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:
Again, though, the method is what he says offends him.
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.
Another thought... People treat Apple like their favorite political party / religion. Humans are tribal and Apple devotees (read fanboys) have chosen their tribe for better or worse. They have to defend it. If someone harms your tribe--or at least you believe they attempted to--then they are quite obviously bad people and should be dealt with. Rationality doesn't enter into the equation.
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've made a number of comments about why I believe it qualifies as industrial espionage (though an opportunistic rather than a conspiratorial variety); I have never owned an Apple product and nor do I wish to. I'm just not into their design ethic on any level.
I still think that Gizmodo's abuse of their IP is appalling.
I should add that I thought it was a strange way of stating how he felt too. That response is probably due to the popular usage of offend to mean more than just upset/resentful.
Gruber is the type of guy who is more likely to go by the dictionary definition than popular usage.
Thanks for pointing that out. I knew what the meaning of the word was but I just thought that it was kind of weird. I also have this impression that Gruber takes anything negative towards Apple very personally, more than an average independent observer.
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.
I can understand if someone (including me) not really agreeing the way Gizmodo handled this situation, but are you offended by this?