There’s been a lot of discussion about Gizmodo’s big iPhone scoop, where an iPhone prototype was apparently left in a bar. The person who found it then went round the gadget sites, selling it to Gizmodo for $5,000 (says the New York Times).

Gawker Media (Gizmodo’s parent company) has made a smart financial investment here: apparently the story has already had 20 million-plus page views. But the whole thing stinks.

Gawker says it didn’t know the iPhone was stolen. That seems awfully far-fetched to me: you don’t pay five grand for something you suspect will be a cheap Chinese knock-off: you pay because you’re pretty sure it’s an iPhone. And if it’s an iPhone, you can be absolutely certain you’re not being offered it with Apple’s express permission. Whether it was lost in a bar or obtained through more underhanded means, Gawker knew that the person who was flogging it wasn’t the rightful owner.

There’s no public interest justification for what Gawker has done. It hasn’t exposed price fixing, or exploding hardware, or child labour, or anything else that we have a reasonable right to know about. Everybody wants to know what’s in the next iPhone, but nobody has the *right* to know.  It’s the tech industry equivalent of paying someone to go through Kerry Katona’s bins or hack into public figures’ voicemail.

Gawker is unrepentant. Of course it is. It got the scoop, it got the hits, and if the poor sod who allegedly lost the phone in the first place gets the sack they’ll get more hits from that. If Apple sues, they’ll get even more hits – and probably more whistleblowers – from the legal tussles, which could go on for months or even years. From Gawker’s perspective, the whole thing is the most epic win possible.

From here, though, it looks like chequebook journalism at its most tawdry. Paying for stolen property and exposing trade secrets to make a bit more ad revenue isn’t the sort of behaviour that makes people go “when I grow up, I want to be a journalist” – and more importantly, it’s going to make Apple’s (and others’) control freakery even worse, possibly with unintended consequences: remember last year’s suicide when a Chinese worker lost an iPhone prototype?

And of course, it exposes some of us as hypocrites. I might not like it, but that didn’t stop me reading it – and every click is a vote in favour of more bad behaviour.

Me, writing about the Digital Economy Bill debacle:

UK broadband is ten. How would we manage without it?

If Chatroulette had existed in the year 2000 you’d have had to draw your genitals on a bit of paper, choose somebody’s address from the phone book and post the picture to their house.

The Times and Sunday Times are doing the paywall thing from June. I’ve written a wee bit about it:

What we do know is that publishers need to do something now – or at least, they do if they want to avoid the same fate as the record industry.

The businesses aren’t identical – with newspapers, the people giving stuff away for free are the newspapers, not pirates – but the imminent iPad could be as much of a doomsday device as the iPod proved to be for the record business.

The iPad is a credible alternative to print, a device that’s usable for reading in a way laptops and desktops simply aren’t. If it, the next Kindle or some other new device takes off as a newsreader while free access remains the norm, then what little money’s left in news will be diverted from the content creators and into the pockets of the hardware firms.

It may be too late for the news business, of course. They’ve been giving their stuff away for a very long time now. If you’d been working for free for a decade and suddenly asked your boss to pay you, he’d probably tell you to piss off.

Craig Grannell, on the same topic:

Most online ‘journalism’ is bullshit, with people frantically copying and pasting stories without bothering to do any investigation or check any facts, and that’s because they’re being paid a few quid for a blog post (if that), rather than a decent amount of money to write some informed, professional copy.

I’ve written a wee piece on Techradar about GameCrush, the frankly bizarre new service that will enable you to play videogames with girls, for a fee.

Paying women to talk to you? Isn’t that what the ads for HOT GRANNY ACTION in the back of movie magazines and men’s magazines are for?

Apparently not. GameCrush’s ethos is much purer than that. It’s designed to engage the brain, not engorge the groin. That’s why the girls can choose to offer chats ranging from “flirty” to “dirty” or, if they’re feeling particularly empowered, “flirty and dirty”.

Me at Techradar:

What we’ve got, then, isn’t a case of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted: it’s a case of locking the stable door after the horse has evolved opposable thumbs, learnt to drive cars and driven through the stable in a Challenger tank. It’s far too late for Netscape and Microsoft’s browser share will never recapture its near-total control of the internet.

It’s not going to make much difference to the minority browsers, either.