It looks like there is an escalating battle brewing between Apple and Gawker Media. The feud started when one of the Gawker blog sites, a tech site called Gizmodo, bought a prototype iPhone 4 that had been lost by an Apple employee. They dismantled it, took pictures of it, snooped as deeply as they could and blogged every detail to the world. This was weeks before the official announcement of the new iPhone, and Apple was not pleased. They hold to a very strict level of secrecy when it comes to their upcoming products, and they don’t think its funny when someone breaks that secrecy.
Gizmodo could have immediately notified Apple about the phone, and build good will with them. Instead, they bought the phone (which under California law constitutes buying stolen property) and told the world in vivid detail. Not surprisingly, Gizmodo found itself uninvited to the official unveiling at WWDC. Today Gawker Media fired back with a post that blamed Apple for a security breach that exposed some personal information of cellular iPad owners. The trouble is that the error was AT&Ts,not Apple. The blog post goes to strenuous lengths to vilify Apple, so I guess they’ve decided to become a vocal enemy of Apple, despite the lack of factual support to their argument. So far, the anti-Apple bias hasn’t crept into the other Gawker sites (including, ironically, Gizmodo) but if it does show up, it will be pretty clear that it’s a mandate from the top of Gawker on down. Will this change or affect Apple in any significant way? Nope.
Chris Loblaw, Author 