DrunkenBlog

The fog of the story

I'd really like to know the story behind that post, when are you going to do your usual redux?

It seems what people are really after is not so much a redux but a post-mortem on how it came together and such. I can completely understand wanting that, and it's something I'll probably do, but the time isn't really right for that... mostly because this story isn't over and it's still in-progress as far as I'm concerned.

However, I'll try to get through some of the other questions. Where appropriate, they're paraphrased as usual to try to take out more birds with fewer stones...

I'd like to ask you your take on the sincerity of Sunny from your interview -- is he being truthful about what happened?

You can never be 100% sure in something like this, as there are way too many sides you can't explore and things you can't put out into the open without breaking confidences.

You're kind of groping through through a room filled with fog and feeling for the landmarks as you go, but after awhile you can start to build a mental map of what you're in, even if you can't see all the colors. If you can't guess, I have a feeling some of this is new for blogs, and I'm making up some of it as I go while trying to be responsible.

Apple obviously hasn't commented at all about the case (and wouldn't return my calls -- yes, I tried). I allow for the possibility of things getting glossed over by memory here and there, but I believe, at least to the best of my knowledge, that he's being honest about what happened.

This wasn't a case of me sending off a few questions and posting the answers. I have done my usual research. If you've read the site for awhile, you may have an idea of the type of research I do just for a normal interview. It's freaked a few of them out, but the research I've done on this has been over and beyond that -- exponentially.

I've gone down the rabbit hole on this story and met some white hares and smoking caterpillars, but I've done my absolute best not to go native and I certainly didn't want to get taken for a ride.

I won't go into how many hours I've spent on this or how many people I've talked to, mostly because at this point it would just be hard to quantify and my sense of time has been warped. It feels like I've been working on this stuff for months, but obviously it hasn't been months...

However, I will say that I took nothing at face value and I cross-checked many, many stories from people looking for inconsistencies. I haven't been able to find anything to prove anything he's said wrong, but I have been able to find things that have corroborated things he's said.

This case is more than a little weird, and there are some very odd inconsistencies that I haven't been able to really pin down.

I.E., in the court papers Apple says Sunny downloaded the build from MTKA that another defendant had already uploaded, and then reseeded it, which was in violation of the NDA he had clicked when he signed up for the free developer tools.

In the interview, Sunny says he actually got the software straight from the Apple Developer Connection, after signing up to get a key that someone sent him to allow him to get the seed, then specifically uploaded it for the MTKA community.

There's an inconsistency there, but it's probably not in Sunny's favor, which means I'm inclined to believe his account. I don't like inconsistencies, so I've zeroed in on this with Sunny more than once... the details have stayed the same, and there are a lot of details. Really specific stuff, which makes me more inclined to believe what he's saying.

Additionally, I've received more than one tip from independent sources that someone actually did give him the key like he said, that Apple knows who it is, and that he's been dealt with. I haven't had enough sources corroborate exactly how he was punished, but if they're true he's paid a pretty heavy price for his mistake.

This is just one example of things I've been able to verify regarding his account, and while there could be some grand conspiracy to mislead me... Still, I can't corroborate and verify everything, but I've been able to do it with enough things that the account seems solid. If it didn't, I wouldn't have run with it.

Remember, when this all first happened I didn't know what exactly could happen or what I was opening myself up for. About a million things went through my head, not the least of which was not wanting to be the first blogger in the USA to end up in jail for being subpoenaed and refusing to divulge sources or something.

In some ways, I still don't know what could come of the stories I'm trying to tell here. Apple could probably choose to make my life miserable in a big way, and I can identify with those involved in the case in the sense that there's no way I could afford a lawsuit, yet I'd done all this research through all these sources that I promised I'd keep confidential...

In other words, I had a lot to consider, and I did it anyways, because my gut tells me it's the right thing to do. It's a story that should be told, and it's a conversation worth having no matter which side you're on.

Doesn't Sunny seem to be trying just a little too hard to portray himself as a 'nice guy'?

I could see why people might say that, or get that impression. There are a few things I'd keep in mind, though...

Something a lot of people overlooked is that when the first interview went live was it came right after he and the others had just had their names dragged through the web in a big way. It's probably a pretty surreal experience to find out that you were being sued online, and then to see all the comments being made about you in various places.

For giggles, feel free to go back through the comments on various sites and realize the type of stuff that was said. I know to never walk into slashdot.org without salt mine, but for someone like Sunny it was a pretty traumatic experience... especially because most people didn't even take into consideration that Sunny would be following the story pretty closely considering he hadn't even seen the legal papers.

Being weighed, judged, and sentenced all over the web at the snap of a finger would send most people reeling. Try it before you knock it, and just look through some of the things that were said in the last post. I don't think anyone kept in mind that Sunny would of course be looking through each and every comment that they wrote about him.

Something I don't think a lot of people take into account about the Mac base is just what an island a Mac user usually is in the real world outside of a 100 mile radius of Cupertino. Before the real rise of the internet, this led to people forming things like the MUGs (Macintosh User Groups), which are rapidly being replaced by the web. To many Mac users, these online communities are their communities, and watching that turn on you can be pretty rough.

It's fairly understandable to me that he was reacting to the way people were portraying him, and the things they were assuming about him in that interview.

If you think the sympathy card is really being overplayed -- there were things he could have mentioned that he didn't. He didn't mention that he's hindu, his family is indian, and his extended family is from a small fishing village on the eastern coast of India. Right after the lawsuits happened, the tsunami happened, so you can imagine where his thoughts were.

His parents are actually in India right now, and from what I've heard everyone is fine although the harbor is pretty messed up.

*shrugs* I've been dragged through the web ringer before, and I can still sorta remember what the first time was like even if it wasn't on the scale these people went through, so perhaps I can just relate to where he was coming from here better than most.

It just takes a little while to develop a thicker skin, and to adjust to the situation, and the wounds were pretty raw when that interview first went up.

How the hell can someone not know what an NDA is?

Some of this makes more sense now that people have been talking about than it did when the story first broke. Even I thought the whole NDA thing was kind of a strange tactic to be focusing on in the grand scheme of things.

My impression is he's not trying to get out of his mistake by saying he didn't understand the NDA, or even realize what he was clicking, just that he was pretty shocked that clicking that some buttons he'd already forgotten about, if he even paid attention to them when he was doing it, were the cause of his falling down the rabbit hole.

And yeah, from talking to him, the NDA stuff was the last thing on his mind. He was clicking in a hurry to get that key so he could play with Dashboard. Apparently, the pirates are entirely enamored of Dashboard, and much fun is had creating and helping to test each others widgets. Sigh.

Of course, from what I've heard, things have changed quite a bit in the ADC and there are now great big flashing neon signs telling you what you're not supposed to do. Still, and this is from several conversations and my take from the interview, he's not trying to use that as an excuse, or to say that he had no intention of sharing it...

How could someone think it would be 'OK' to 'share it with a few friends'?

Empathy isn't something a lot of technical people are particular good at, unless it's binary. You need to think of things from his frame of reference, and go back to the whole community deal, and a statement like that makes more sense.

This was a guy who switched last year, bought a Powerbook, and turned into a Mac fanatic overnight. The forums of MTKA and some of the rumor sites pretty much were the Mac community to him, at least where the interesting things were talked about... like 3GHz G5s and such.

You don't have to go far to see just how hung up he was on the term 'malicious' from the court papers -- in his head, he wasn't trying to do Apple any harm, and didn't think he was, yet here was Apple saying he was out to hurt the company.

From what I can gather, to him it was more like a bunch of Star Wars geeks passing around leaked stills of Episode III with a bunch of other die-hard Star Wars fans and oohing over how cool it was going to be, not taking it to a rival studio as some form of payback... and it's not like a rival studio is going to be able to splice the new CGI footage of Yoda into their upcoming movie anyways.

I don't think he thought it would come back on him like this either, which was another part of that reasoning. It wasn't the first leak of Tiger on the net available for download, nor the first he'd played with, just one of that build. I don't think he thought he was in virgin territory and no one else had gotten sued. To my mind, that should be food for thought for the extreme positions on both sides of the issue.

Doesn't Sunny seem to be trying just a little too hard to portray himself as naive?

You know, Sunny is really kind of stupid about some things, but most of that has to do with his frame of reference rather than his innate intelligence. I'll defer to the ham story on this one, but suffice to say, most people are idiots when they're operating outside of their frame of reference.

Something that I think some people missed was that the title of the interview, 'Collateral Damage', was really meant to cut both ways. Irony and all that.

The just ain't a criminal mastermind or manipulator. His days are spent speculating about all things Apple, his girlfriend, trying to get through or organic chemistry and listening to 'Barbie Girl' when he's really depressed. I really wish I was making the last one up.

He's 22, why do you call him a kid?

I'm only a few years older than him, but that's just pretty much how I think of him. No, he's not 16 years old, but while I know some very mature people in college, their frame of reference just often isn't the most mature or worldly.

Is Apple being forced to sue to protect their IP? Do they not have a choice?

This is so far beyond the scope of me being able to give a real answer, let alone 99% of the population that it's kinda scary. My gut says no for a variety of reasons, but I shouldn't even really be saying that.

These are good questions though, and I'm trying to talk some lawyers into sitting down and going through them for the blog. This isn't as easy as you might think. If you know any in the field that feel like slumming, send them my way.

Has Apple lost their mind?

No, Apple has some real problems in their mind that they're trying to address, even if they're being kinda heavy-handed about it. Those perceived problems, and their IP, should be respected and taken seriously, whether it's Apple's or the GPL or the BSD license.

If you didn't catch it from the post, I don't think anyone 'in the middle' condones what Sunny and the others are alleged to have done (Remember, Sunny is the only one who has gone on record as saying so, and mistakes have been made before). Apple has a legitimate grievance against him, and it shouldn't be brushed away.

However, it does seem like they're using a tactical nuke on a couple of kids who are tagging the local underpass in an effort to send a message to the other kids doing it across the country because someone with their finger on the button really doesn't like graffiti.

From what I've heard, it's been working to an extent and people are stepping very cautiously in that world at the moment. Unfortunately, when you start throwing nukes around there's a high chance of fallout and mutually assured destruction, which is why it's usually a last resort.

It doesn't feel like it was a last resort in this case, and I'll go back to my ending of the Collateral Damage post where my gut tells me via a very queasy feeling that if there was a will there's prolly a more creative way.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    February 25, 2005, at 12:06 AM