NewsTrust - Apple - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

The Tragedy of Mike Daisey's Lies About China

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Max Fisher - Mar. 18 (Opinion) - American consumers can't do much for Central Africa or Afghanistan, but they have real power to improve Chinese labor abuses. Will they be less inclined to believe the next person who tells them how?

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'This American Life' Retracts Episode on Apple's Suppliers in China

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Brian Stelter - Mar. 17 (Opinion) - The show says it was misled by Mike Daisey, whose one-man show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" was the basis of a program that aired in January. Mr. Daisey responded, "I stand by my work."

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Busting Mr. Daisey

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Reuters - By Jack Shafer - Mar. 17 (Opinion) - This week, the highly regarded public radio show This American Life learned a lesson that many journalists, including me, have learned the hard way: It’s almost impossible for an editor to fact-check a contributor who lies. The show, hosted by Ira Glass, just retracted its Jan. 6, 2012, episode, “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory,” adapted from Mike Daisey’s popular one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which is about working conditions in a Chinese factory that makes Apple products. Daisey’s deceptions were uncovered by Rob Schmitz, a China-based reporter for Marketplace. This American Life will air an hourlong explanation and re-examination this weekend, featuring both Glass and Daisey, about the circumstances behind the retraction. Glass and the show are to be commended for their quick response, and everybody who cares about real journalism owes a debt of gratitude to Schmitz.

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How will technology influence the news in 2012?

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Dan Gillmor - Dec. 29 (Opinion) - Predicting the next year's news is a fool's errand, but looking at technological trends could give us a hint At the beginning of 2011, aging dictators ruled Egypt and Libya, and despotism was the nearly unquestioned reality in most of the Middle East. The eurozone was seeing trouble at its edges, but wasn't heading toward collapse. News International had successfully covered up most of its rampant bad acts, and Rupert Murdoch was on the verge of even greater control over British media and politics. Anyone who might have predicted how utterly and rapidly those realities would change might have been branded a lunatic. Which is one reason why the annual journalistic ritual of making predictions about the year ahead is a fool's errand. With that in mind, let me offer instead some observations about the technology and media trends we've seen in past months, and how they might play out in 2012. In many cases, the trajectory is deeply worrisome. But I remain an eternal optimist in the face of ...

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A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Mona Simpson - Oct. 31 (Opinion) - I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.

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The Limits of Magical Thinking

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Maureen Dowd - Oct. 26 (Opinion) - Steve Jobs, the mad perfectionist, even perfected his stare. He wanted it to be hypnotic. He wanted the other person to blink first. He wanted it to be, like Dracula’s saturnine gaze, a force that could bend your will to his and subsume your reality

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Do mobile, the cloud and social spell the end of the PC era?

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Jean-Louis Gassée - Oct. 24 (Opinion) - These are the three interdependent forces that power the biggest wave of growth, change, and destruction I've seen since I have been allowed to take part in the high-tech industry. In the beginning (or mine, anyway), back in 1968 when I was, miraculously, offered a salary to be part of HP France there was the mainframe. IBM – "The Company" – reigned supreme, a dynasty that seemed unassailable. The IBMer wore a suit and tie when approaching the punch card feeder. Big Blue's competitors, the BUNCH, were also called the Seven Dwarves because their combined market share couldn't compare to IBM's dominance.

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Why Google had to have Motorola Mobility

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Dan Gillmor - Aug. 17 (Opinion) - The acquisition has provoked comment about defensive buying of patents, but Google surely has more ambition than that For several years now, Google has been following a vow made by former CEO Eric Schmidt: mobile first. New CEO Larry Page is taking that dictum to a new level by announcing a deal to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5bn . The implications of this deal depend entirely on how Google plans to use Motorola. If, as some claim, the deal is more about obtaining Motorola's mobile patent portfolio than anything else, we can expect escalating patent warfare between technology giants and limited innovation beyond that. If, however, Google intends to operate the business it is acquiring, we may see some broad and sweeping changes in the technology industry. If the deal is chiefly about obtaining Motorola's mobile patent portfolio, then Google would likely spin off the hardware end of the company and keep the software and patents. The patents would be vital weapons in its competition with ...

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The iCloud just works ... but in whose favour?

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Douglas Haddow - Jun. 12 (Opinion) - No wonder Apple is keen to push the idea of a post-PC era in which all your stuff goes through its sprawling data complex As with all Apple unveilings, the iCloud was met with a monsoon of hype. Introduced to the public at the tech monolith's developers conference last Monday, it was hailed as a "time warp loophole" , a "tipping point" , and "the end of stuff" . A bit much, considering how humdrum it is when compared to previous product launches. The iCloud is essentially a rebranding and expansion of Apple's MobileMe cloud service, which has ceased accepting new subscriptions and will be discontinued when iCloud goes live. Indeed, there is nothing new here, apart from ambition. Most of us already utilise cloud computing on a daily basis, be it with Google Docs, Flickr or Tumblr. What differentiates the iCloud is how it hints at what's to come. During his keynote, Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, boasted that the iCloud signifies the beginning of the post-PC era, stating: "We are ...

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A lesson of PBS's Tupac Shakur 'story' | Dan Gillmor

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Dan Gillmor - Jun. 01 (Opinion) - Digital news is much more vulnerable to hacking and hoaxing than old media. Scepticism must be in the eye of the beholderLast week, the website of America's Public Broadcasting Service featured an incredible story: the rap artist Tupac Shakur, killed half a decade ago, was actually not dead; rather, the story said, he was alive and living peacefully in New Zealand.The news was incredible because it was false. Hackers, apparently angry at a PBS Frontline documentary about WikiLeaks leak suspect Bradley Manning, had found security flaws and temporarily taken over the site. Their Tupac "scoop" did little harm in the end – though it exposed PBS as a news organisation that needed to work a lot harder to ensure online security.Little harm in this case – but false news is not a minor issue in the online world. In October 2008, someone using the pseudonym "johntw" posted an item to CNN's "iReport" site claiming that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, had suffered a major heart attack. This claim made its way to a financial blog and began racing around the web and email threads. Apple's shares tumbled briefly, recovering when it became clear that the posting was a hoax. That was, in effect, an invited hack: CNN hadn't taken sufficient care to vet the iReports or to warn the site's viewers that they should regard everything there as inherently unreliable.Hackers are also finding ways to put false words in other people's mouths, or keyboards. That's what an American congressman, Anthony Weiner, says happened to him recently with social media services when a lewd photo supposedly was sent to a Twitter follower. That case is doubly suspicious given that it was first reported by a rightwing website run by a man who's notorious for spreading misinformation.The people who sold Apple stock upon hearing the bogus news in 2008 were fools. Anyone who assumed that Weiner was guilty of lewd photo-sharing based on a report spun by a well-known manipulator is a fool, too.The PBS story, however, raised a serious question for news organisations and the people who get most of their news online. Even though the Tupac story was relatively benign, as hoaxes go, it demonstrated how entirely possible, even likely, it has become for even the most reputable news organisations to be victims of these kinds of hacks.One of these days, hackers are going to take over the home page of the New York Times, or the Guardian, or the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times, and they are going to post a story that could have much more troubling consequences. The right (wrong) kind of posting could start a stockmarket panic, for example. Or, in even more scary circumstances, it might further inflame ethnic tensions or nationalistic fervour that sparks worse fighting in already violent places. The only surprise, when this occurs, will be that it didn't happen sooner.This leads to our changing responsibility as news consumers. In the past, even though we knew that the daily newspaper didn't get everything right, and that the evening news programme was shallow and sometimes wrong, we didn't doubt that we were seeing what these news organisations had reported with their own staffs or had received via their own trusted news services. It was vanishingly unlikely that anyone could create an entire fake newspaper or hijack the airwaves.The odds that hackers are showing fake news on any particular traditional or new media website right now are small. But as the PBS hack shows, they are not zero.And even if, by some miracle, this never occurs, sometimes our best news organisations occasionally get things badly wrong. The classic recent example is a spate of mistaken reports of the death of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in the wake of the Arizona shootings in January. She is, of course, alive and in intensive therapy.Our obligation as news users is to be sceptical of everything, especially stories that sound incredible and breaking news. We have to be especially careful not to overreact to what we see and hear. The consequences of being wrong are growing, as the dupes who sold Apple shares can attest.Scepticism doesn't mean we should automatically disbelieve everything; it does mean that we should use judgment. In my case, I have a category for all such items: "Interesting if true."US televisionNewspapers & magazinesNewspapersHackingInternetDigital mediaSocial mediaTwitterUS politicsUnited StatesWikiLeaksAppleSteve JobsDan Gillmorguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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Don't Buy Me an iPad for Christmas

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Brett Arends - Dec. 22 (Opinion) - Ten reasons why Apple's tablet computer—this year's hottest adult toy—makes a lousy gift.

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Is Google Instant ad trying to annoy Steve Jobs?

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

CNET News - By Chris Matyszczyk - Sep. 10 (Opinion) - If you were launching the first step into implanting your product permanently into someone's brain, would you employ Bob Dylan? Oh, I know he's a very fine musician, autobiographer and performer at corporate functions. But does he still symbolize the idea that the times are a-changin' and your brain needs re-arrangin'? This vexing question occupies the part of my mind normally reserved for baseball and scones because Google Instant, the search engine that tries to know what you want slightly before you do, seems to have done an ad featuring the original Robert Zimmerman. To the tune of his "Subterranean Homesick Blues," we see how instantly Google's new tool anticipates the fact that someone is making an ad featuring the lyrics to "Subterranean Homesick Blues."

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How Apple could bite the free press | Dan Kennedy

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Dan Kennedy - Apr. 21 (Opinion) - Apple is hailed by many as saviour of the news industry, but its iPad and iPhone aren?t entirely compatible with an open society What started out as a narrow dispute between Apple and software developers has turned into a raging controversy over free speech. The case of Mark Fiore , an editorial cartoonist who was banned from Apple?s iTunes Store, illustrates a heretofore unappreciated connection between open systems and an open society. And it raises serious questions about Apple?s supposed role as a saviour of the faltering news business. Our story begins on 12 April, when Fiore won a Pulitzer prize for his animated political cartoons at SFGate.com, the San Francisco Chronicle?s website. A few days later Fiore, a freelancer, revealed to ...

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How Apple Has Rethought a Gospel of the Web

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Steven Johnson - Apr. 11 (Opinion) - Who says a closed platform can’t nurture creativity? Apple’s App Store can advance the ideals of innovation — and online democracy, too, Steven Johnson says.

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The iPad Launch: Can Steve Jobs Do It Again?

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Stephen Fry - Apr. 03 (Review) - I am here at Apple's invitation to try out the iPad, and later in my visit I will spend an hour with the company's boss, Steve Jobs — the first time I've ever spent any real time with him. But as I meet with Schiller and Cue, I feel it only fair to reel off the list of negatives the iPad will meet on its release. It falls between two stools — neither small enough to be truly portable nor big enough to be called a proper computer. Everything, I point out, is under Apple's control, as usual. No Adobe Flash capability, no multitasking, no camera. It's just a scaled-up iPhone or iPod Touch.

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How the Tablet Will Change the World

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Steven Levy - Mar. 23 (Opinion) - There was a surprising pitch for the iPad as a lean-forward device, one that runs a revamped version of Apple’s iWork productivity apps. In many ways, Jobs claimed, the iPad would be better than pricier laptops and desktops as a tool for high-end word processing and spreadsheets. If anyone missed the point, Apple’s design guru Jonathan Ive gushed in a promotional video that the iPad wasn’t just a cool new way to gobble up media — it was blazing a path to the future of computing.

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Is University of Missouri's iPod Touch 'Requirement' Fair?

Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

PBS - By Bryan Murley - May. 20 (Comment) - But the "requirement" wasn't really a "requirement," if you read further into the Missourian article: The requirement will not be enforced, however, and there will not be a penalty for students who chose not to buy an iPod touch or iPhone, [Associate Dean Brian] Brooks said. "The reason we put 'required' on it is to help the students on financial need," Brooks said. "If it's required, it can be included in your financial need estimate. If we had not required it, they wouldn't be able to do that."

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Apple TV: Why It Matters

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 09:13:13 -0800

PC Magazine - By Tim Bajarin - Feb. 23 (Opinion) - Now Apple is extending its digital lifestyle concept to the TV, with Apple TV. I find this move by Apple very interesting and potentially important to the market because of the impact it may have on consumer trends. Of course, Apple is not the first to try to extend Mac/PC content to the living room; in fact, it's five years late. Microsoft's Windows Media Center has been doing this since 2002 with mixed results, and various other media adapters have come to market since then and gotten only minimal consumer acceptance.

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Charlie Rose interviews Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 00:00:00 -0700

Charlie Rose - By Charlie Rose, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal - Aug. 31 (Interview) - Charlie Rose interviews Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, one of the world's most successful investors. He was born in Beirut from a lebanese mother and Saudi prince. ... He received a degree in business from Menlo College and later a masters from Syracuse. He began investing in his early twenties. Some have called him the Saudi Arabian Warren Buffett. He is currently the fifth richest man in the world, with a fortune estimated at 25 billion dollars. His Kingdom Holdings Company controls major stakes in blue chip companies like Time Warner, Citigroup, News Corp and Apple. ... He owns the Plaza Hotel in New York, the Savoy in London, the George V in Paris.

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