Mac News Shorts

The Good:
Bloggers Win One vs. Apple
A California appeals court has sided with bloggers, saying that Apple has no legal right to subpoena information from them regarding alleged employees' leakage of product information. The blogs involved were Powerpage.org and AppleInsider. There were a couple issues involved. One was Apple's right to subpoena without providing any evidence that they had exhausted their own search methods for the identity of the employee. The other issue was that Apple contended these blogs were not journalistic in nature and not subject to First Amendment protection. The court clearly stated that there is no metric to decide if something is journalistic or not, and that to do so would violate the First Amendment.

"In addition to being a free speech victory for every citizen reporter who uses the Internet to distribute news, today's decision is a profound electronic privacy victory for everyone who uses email," said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "The court correctly found that under federal law, civil litigants can't subpoena your stored email from your service provider."

(Sources: TUAW, EFF, PowerPage)

My reaction? Woohoo! This is the correct and appropriate ruling. We all know the MSM (mainstream media) is full of crap and has no more journalistic integrity than any other human being that publishes anything. We also know that you don't need a license or permission to call yourself a media source in the US. (China is another matter...) In today's world where average people have very effective means to communicate to the masses, any such certification would be met with derision. But perhaps the best news is that all those righteous MacSheep who screamed that these blogs were giving away trade secrets and their publishers should be hauled off to jail if they didn't comply... well those pinheads can now officially f--- themselves. Time for Apple to go after their leaky employees, not weblogs that work hard to promote their products.

The Bad:
Buy one iPod per year!
Steve Jobs suggests that people should be buying an iPod a year if they want to have the best stuff in an interview with NBC (via Engadget).

My take: Hmmm, well if you would make one worth buying every year... I love my nano, despite the scratches. But I also want to love my 3G iPod - but it seems to have stopped uploading new files and crashes iTunes. I don't want to buy the newer video iPod - too big a body & too small a screen for movies. Yup, I might purchase v2 of the video iPod if they address these problems. But until then, I'm not interested. I don't think I'm the only one who feels this way.

The Ugly:
New eMacs Coming?
AppleInsider is reporting that Apple is working hard on a slimmed down replacement of their eMac line, sporting Intel processors and perhaps LCD screens. Engadget has a nice mock-up of what it could look like.

My reaction? *Yawn*. With the inexpensive MacBooks and Intel Minis, does Apple need another inexpensive machine? Perhaps for mass sales to public school systems it could be useful. But Apple really needs to get off its collective ass and make a truly portable laptop @2kg or less. There is an entire market they are kissing off by ignoring this, particularly here in Japan.