The iPhone 4G scandal has been pretty hard to avoid. First, the actual uncovering of the device broke some serious headlines, then the outing of the poor employee who lost it, then it’s formal return request from Apple… the whole saga has been rolling out in front of the blogosphere in full view, including the latest happenings, which saw a turn of the tables as Gizmodo editor Jason Chen had his computer equipment confiscated by the police last Friday.

Naturally, Gizmodo is crying fowl, issuing a statement to the authorities that the search and seizure was invalid.  However, the reasons behind their perceived “invalidity” of the warrant are bogus, and here’s why.

First, we have to look at the crime in hand. The crime for which the warrant was set to attain evidence for. Grand Theft.

Under California Law, it’s illegal to knowingly acquire stolen merchandise (CA Penal Code 485). What constitutes stolen? Under California Law, anything which is lost is considered “stolen”, if the acquirer of the object knows of the owner and fails to make a reasonable effort to return the device to said owner. Clearly Gizmodo was aware of this fact, since they famously outed the fellow who lost it.

So, the actual crime is indeed theft, hopefully we can all agree on this. Also a fun fact: In California, stolen possessions worth over $400 are considered “grand theft”, and filed under the felony category of crimes. Since Gizmodo paid $5,000 for the device, and also since all but the lowest of the current production iPhones fall above that price (not counting the AT&T subsidization here), it’s pretty clear that the crime involved is not just normal theft, but grand theft.

At the very least, Gizmodo is guilty of grand theft. Journalist laws do not apply here, no matter what argument might be thrown, there’s no press blanket for buying stolen merchandise. And yes, it was stolen. According to CA law.

Now that we know the crime, lets take a look at the two rebuttals to the warrant that Gawker threw out:

The first had to deal with section 1524g of the CA Penal Code (and, relatedly, section 1070 of the Evidence Code), which protects journalists from having evidence taken to out their sources. This would be a valid claim if the CA law enforcement were only interested in finding out the source who sold the phone. However, considering the previous mention about the actual crime involved, apparently it’s not the source the police are going after. It’s Gizmodo. This fact makes the 1070 argument completely invalid.

The second claim is ridiculous, with Gizmodo stating the search warrant wasn’t valid because they think the warrant, which was executed sometime around 9pm, was executed during night time hours. A warrant only counts as a night time warrant if the search begins after 10pm. If it starts before 10 and extends after 10, it’s still valid. Their claims invalidate their own statement on that front.

This search and seizure has nothing to do with the rights of journalists. This has everything to do with California anti-theft law. By all counts, the police took Chen’s computers to prove that a crime (aka the theft / purchase) was committed. It’s as simple as that.

So please, don’t think Jason Chen is some hero of journalism. It’s not nearly that complicated.

Afterthought: I want to say, on the record, it was just about the douchiest thing in the world for Gizmodo to out the kid who lost the phone, while keeping the person who found it (and illegally sold it) anonymous. Gizmodo’s claim that they were trying to protect the kid’s job is disingenuous at best. He lost the phone over a month ago. If Apple was going to fire him, they would have done that when he lost it, well before the story broke to the press. Don’t be liars, too, Gizmodo – you outed him for nobody but yourself.

Losing _why was bad enough, as his voice will be missed by anyone who’s ever interacted with the Ruby language, but another loss we suffered was in the fact that when _why left, he took his work with him.

Losing _why’s work is a great loss, one which will be far-reaching an long-lasting, especially by those who have adopted his code into their own projects. There’s no more Camping, no more Shoes, no more Why’s Guide, no more Try Ruby. There’s much more we lost, but to list it all would require a blog post within itself. The revocation of his projects hurts all of us, and while I try not to be offended by his brash actions, I can’t help but feel that his actions were completely and utterly selfish.

I’ve always been in the thought-mind that by being a programmer, and creating programs, you are creating something much bigger than yourself. Especially if you go on to release them open-source. Once you do that, like _why did many times over with his work, they become their own entity – a sort of life form of their own, and they are no longer just your work, they are themselves a part of the community in their own right.

It would have been one thing to simply abandon the projects, this has happened many times in the open-source community and will continue to do so, as programmers lose interest / change their lifestyle, or what have you. That’s the beauty of open-source, someone else can then step in and continue where the originator left off. The project can live on.

The fact that _why chose to eliminate his projects from the Internet is a hurtful blow, as many people use his projects in their work, and now have to scrounge through the caches of the Interwebs to find even a trace of documentation. _why clearly didn’t consider the ruby community at all when he decided to abandon ship, at worst he did think of us and didn’t care. Either way it’s a pretty sad ending to what should have been a great story.

It’s no secret that media streaming sites, such as Hulu, don’t function outside the US. If you visit Hulu from Mexico (or France, or Zimbabwe…) Hulu will display a message that you’re outside their ad-supported geobubble, and thus, cannot view it’s content.

Aside from this being a total buzzkill (how am I going to watch my Daily Show now?), I’ll say that it also introduces a very limited mindset from advertisers in how to reach their audience. Just because I’m accessing a website from a particular location doesn’t mean that I’m from that location. As the Internet becomes increasingly integrated into our lives, it opens up a freedom for us to explore more, to change our location, because thanks to the Internet, we can still be productive and do all the same things that we’d do from our homes.

Lets take another example of location-based advertising. Facebook, the epitome of “how can we make targeted ad revenue work” also fails hard in this respect. Even though my language of choice on Facebook is set to English, and my networks are all US-Based, about 80% of the advertisements shown to me on Facebook are in Spanish. Even worse, I’ve seen plenty of ads telling me how I can “earn a green card and gain my right to work in America.”

Umm… really? Wow, cool. It’s not like I’m an American citizen or anything.

So, it’s easy to complain, but we need to address the issue and offer solutions, and while I think my suggestion could be considered a bit ‘backwards’, it’s a hell of a lot better than this short-sighted “you are your IP address” mentality that the Internet is currently resorting to. I want Hulu to send me a letter. A real letter, like with a postage stamp and everything (yes, those still exist). Let me verify my US address, let me convince you that although I may be currently viewing your content from the lovely beaches of Puerto Vallarta, I am indeed a US citizen, and when you show me advertisements, it’d be much more effective ad-targeting for you to show me ones from the US than from Mexico.

I think your advertisers would see the logic in this, especially as expatriate communities continue to boom.

Not only am I addicted to music, but I’m addicted to the psychology behind music. I love deciphering music patterns, seeing what I listen to compared with my friends and those in different social circles around me. So it should be no surprise that I have a last.fm account that I actively use.

The other night, I went to check my account page on the site, and nearly had a heart attack. For some reason, most of my data was gone. It just wasn’t showing up, and for about a day I was certain that my data was gone for good.

It was not a good feeling. Never before had I thought about how much trust I’ve put in the last.fm service, and how vulnerable I am to anything that happens to them. What if the company tanks? What if, one day, they decide, “screw this”, and close their doors? What then, with my years of stored data, my musical history?

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. I used to be a member of the Textamerica service, which was one of the first ‘moblogging’ services out on the net. From the moment I got a cameraphone, I was addicted. I used the service for a few years, publishing my mobile phone pictures to it, using their feeds to place these on my personal sites.. and then, one day, it was gone. I had lost two+ years of personal images, of trips to California and England, all because they decided to become a ‘pay’ service and close all free accounts after a short ‘notice’ period.

To be fair, they announced the changeover on their site, but to be honest, I only logged in to the account a few times a year. I had no reason to, and thus, I was burned.

So all this got me thinking about just how much of our digital lives are out of our hands. What if one day, something happens to Facebook, or Google? Far fetched, I know, but imagine the implications that would arise if one day our data, which we have spent years building and compiling, would cease to exist?

We better start backing our stuff up!

I admit that I could have been a bit more tactful with some of my previous comments, but I did compliment the design, and I am still very impressed with it. However, even after the explanations and the excuses about 10 year old code and CMS limitations, something doesn’t sit right with me. I can’t quite put my finger on it, and I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I feel like the front-end development on the site could have been executed better.

So, I’m gonna put my money where my mouth is… in a way. I’ve accepted a “Web Application Developer” position with Fox News.com, where I’ll be pushing ahead with the latest and greatest in front-end web development. When the time comes to redesign the site, I bet anyone $10 it’ll have a doctype.

This is what happens when Microsoft tries to make a website.

It was quite a sad reality to discover. My friend and coworker, Sean, told me about the MSNBC.com site redesign tonight on IM, and at first I was blown away – visually they can give themselves a high five. I noticed that the load-time was a bit top-heavy, but it soon turned out to be the least of this site’s problems.

As soon as I clicked ‘View Source’, I wished that I hadn’t. If the Doctype wasn’t disappointing enough, the 200+ lines of inline JavaScript and CSS put the final nail in the coffin. Oh, and Colin? Great edits there, buddy.

Overall, it’s failing HTML4 Transitional with 43 errors, which to be honest isn’t quite that bad considering the basic fundamentals it’s missing.

Better luck next time, MSNBC.

What’s the site, you say? Why it’s elleslounge.com/mtv!

Why the plug?

Well, for the past few days I have been programming this mini-site, a live ’streaming’ quiz completely controlled by Ajax. During the airing of the musical today on MTV (1-4pm EST), the quiz will run throughout the show’s slot (during commercial breaks), and you can answer to win iPhones, iPods, and more. Everyone wins something, which is cool.

I have to say, it’s by far the most work I’ve done on something that’s only going to be live for a number of hours. It was so worth it.

Seriously.

I first met him at Full Sail, where he taught me how to be a badass at programming. Since then, he’s been around as a constant influence and resource for anything PHP. He’s like a programming dictionary, and you too can tap into this wisdom by visiting his blog at http://www.lovemikeg.com.

PS – Since disclosure is required, this post was paid for in shiny gold facebook bling by Mike G.

PPS – He really is cool. Even without the Facebook bling.