Bonum Certa Men Certa

Apple Allegedly Impersonates Police, Attacks Linux, Finds Support From Its Allies Microsoft and Oracle

Apple cult



Summary: Apple is said to have committed a serious felony by pretending to be police and it is also attacking Linux through the courtroom, much to the chagrin of Microsoft proponents and lobbyists

THE cult which is Apple "will die with steve jobs," wrote to me someone in Identi.ca two hours ago, after I had posted a link about Apple losing its leadership to Linux (more on that in our daily Links).



The latest disgrace from Apple is this allegation that Apple has again misused police powers that it does not have. To quote:

If accurate, his account raises the possibility that Apple security personnel attempting to recover the prototype falsely represented themselves as police officers -- a criminal act punishable by up to a year in jail in the state of California -- or that SFPD employees colluding with Apple failed to properly report an extensive search of a person's home, car, and computer.


A "criminal act"? Don't worry, cults do that a lot. Ask Scientologists. As TechDirt put it in its headline, "Man Claims Apple Investigators Pretended To Be SF Police In Searching For Lost iPhone Prototype". Criminal if true, but Apple is never punished for such behaviour, just like it got away with it the previous time (the police typically protects rich corporations from the people, not vice versa). Quoting TechDirt:

Earlier this week, News.com broke a story of yet another Apple employee losing an iPhone prototype in a bar (stop me if you've heard this one before...). Unlike the last one, this one (as far as we know) did not get sold to some tech website for a few thousand dollars. However, reports are emerging that raise some serious questions about how Apple went about trying to retrieve the phone.

A man in San Francisco, Sergio Calderon, claims that six people showed up at his door claiming to be San Francisco Police Department officers, and that they had badges. They claimed they were looking for a lost phone, but didn't say it was a prototype. The original News.com report had said that police together with Apple investigators went to the guy's house -- but the SFPD says they have no record of SFPD being involved in any such action (which it should have if they were involved). The guy whose house was searched says that no one identified themselves as being from Apple. They also threatened him and his family over their immigration status (even though he says they're all legal). Either way, he was nervous and let them search his house (a mistake) and even check out his computer. They didn't find anything.


What we cannot help but notice is that many of the pro-Microsoft people have become Apple boosters when it comes to the war on Android. They just cannot stand Linux and Free software, so Apple and Microsoft share common goals. Microsoft's shameless booster Matt Rosoff continues to promote anti-Linux sides (Rosoff came from a Microsoft consultancy) and the egomaniac pro-Microsoft lobbyist we have all come to know and loathe also quotes Microsoft boosters like Ed Bott in order to make Android/Google/Linux look bad. That one example was just a few hours ago. He does this all day long. They work in unison to daemonise Android and prop up Apple's case, which by the way has been noticed also by Neil Richards, who writes the column "I Can Sue You, But You Can't Sue Us: Apple". To quote:

Apple has sued almost every other company in the mobile industry, in not only US but around the globe. The company also tried to patent a rectangular design claiming monopoly in the tablet segment.

The same company whose ex-CEO quotes "We are shameless about stealing from others." has sued everyone else over minor similarities in the box of the product, icon design and rectangular shape.

[...]

This is not the first time anti-FOSS bloggers are trying to spin the story. They recently twisted the story of Samsung's victory in the Dutch court as the victory of Apple diluting the fact that Apple lost its design patents and all other software patents except for one. The court gave Samsung 7 weeks and one day's time to fix the problem or the injunction will be enforced. Trusted sources like BBC also fell for this trick and covered the defeat of Samsung.

It is interesting to see that such blogger, with no legal expertise, are supporting Apple's foul cry that Samsung and Motorola are abusing their patents. What they won't tell us is its Apple which is suing everyone else using software patents.

It's interesting to see that the same anti-Android lobbyists while support Apple's 'right' to use a broad rectangular design and block everyone else from selling a device, but they criticize competitors when they try to defend themselves using the technologies they actually invented!


We mentioned this yesterday and also this morning. Apple has no shame left. And on the same subject, for those bolstering the anti-Android camp there's the Oracle case on which Groklaw remarks: "Google's response is a thorough recitation of the current law of copyright when it comes to analyzing software on the issue of copyright infringement, at least within the 9th Circuit. Google's strongest arguments are that the JAVA API's at issue are functional and, thus, not protected by copyright and, to the extent Google has copied anything, the copying has been de minimis, i.e., a few lines of code out of thousands."

What's very popular right now among anti-Android lobbyists is to claim copyright-related problems in Android that almost nobody cares about (not even the developers). They try to cause friction and infighting. Some of these people have employment history in Microsoft. We know those tactics.

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