Why Michael Arrington is a pile of crap

I translate Michael Arrington reaction to the reaction. CAUTION! Bad language ahead!

Okay, so to make a long story short, a hacker stole internal documents from Twitter via a hacked Gmail account. Said hacker then emailed those documents to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. (heretofore referred to as DirtRag.) Michael Arrington spent hour reading these documents, and decided to publish some of them. After a huge outcry on why this is an obvious dirtbag thing to do, Michael Arrington write a reaction to the reaction. Still with me? Good. I decided to post what Michael Arrington is REALLY saying in his reaction article. (in italics below)

Wow, that’s quite a reaction to our post earlier this evening saying that we will publish some of the confidential Twitter documents we’ve been forwarded. Nearly 200 comments in a little over an hour, mostly saying we shouldn’t publish. Hundreds of Tweets, and it has become a trending topic. There’s even a pollasking people if we should post the documents or not.

Translation: Look at us getting attention! We love attention almost as we love visiting porn sites! Maybe more! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!

Let’s put aside the highly sensitive documents that we aren’t going to publish, but which will likely end up on the Internet anyway. We’re not going to post that information whether we have the legal right to or not. No discussion is needed.

Translation: We hope Twitter does not sue us because, ya know, we ain’t posting the REALLY bad stuff. Just some other stuff.

But we are going to publish some of the other information that is relevant to Twitter’s business, particularly product notes and financial projections. Many users say this is “stolen” information and therefore shouldn’t be published. We disagree.

Translation: We don’t care if it’s stolen or not, look at all the attention we are getting! Do you know how much more money we will make in advertising from this? COOL!

We publish confidential information almost every day on TechCrunch. This is stuff that is also “stolen,” usually leaked by an employee or someone else close to the company, and the company is very much opposed to its publication. In the past we’ve received comments that this is unethical. And it certainly was unethical, or at least illegal or tortious, for the person who gave us the information and violated confidentiality and/or nondisclosure agreements. But on our end, it’s simply news.

Translation: Come on, everyone! We’ve never had any morals, integrity, or ethics! If I can make a buck off showing video clips of my grandmother breaking her leg, I would have that shit posted in HD quality!

If you disagree with that, ok. But then you also have to disagree with the entire history of the news industry. “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising,” is something Lord Northcliffe, a newspaper magnate, supposedly said. I agree wholeheartedly.

Translation: See above. And, come on, NATIONAL ENQUIRER! Ring any bells? We here at DirtRag have no morals, no integrity, and no ethics! We can, will, and have come up with the tiniest justification to hide the fact that we are assholes. At least this quote helps us sleep at night, and justifies what we are doing to real news sites. Plus, dude, we are trending on twitter on this! I am SO buying a new car because of this one story!

That doesn’t mean we are entitled to do anything we like in order to get to that information. But if it lands in our inbox, we consider it fair game. And if we have reason to believe it will be widely published regardless of what we do, the decision isn’t a hard one. We throw out the information that is sensitive or could hurt an individual, and publish what we think is newsworthy.

Translation: Dude, seriously, I am getting a lot of press on this! Ever hear another quote “Even bad press is good press”? Hello?

In the end, this is no different than, as an example, this 2006 post where we posted confidential Yahoo documents showing their valuation of Facebook in a proposed acquisition.

Translation: Really, we have been assholes a long time. The only difference this time is YOU HEARD ABOUT IT! We are going to SO rock in that new car.

Nor is it any different than the WSJ publishing this internal Yahoo memo, which was also “stolen” in 2006.

Translation: See, assholes back then, too!

And I believe it is significantly less of an ethical issue than Gawker’s posting of Sarah Palin’s private emails.

Translation: And see! There are other assholes in the world as well! Seriously, we totally want to get paid because of the misery of others. So what if publishing this stuff hurts Twitter and the people who work there? We are getting PAID!

It’s not our fault that Google has a ridiculously easy way to get access to accounts via their password recovery question.

Translation: Misery pays, bee-yotch!

It’s not our fault that Twitter stored all of these documents and sensitive information in the cloud and had easy-to-guess passwords and recovery questions.

Translation: Okay, if you ran into a gas station and left your keys in your car? Totally your fault it gets stolen. Thats, like, not even a crime to take you car in that situation. Seriously, you don’t lock it up, it’s fair game!

We’ve been sitting in the office for eight hours now debating what the right thing to do is in this situation.

Translation: I have never been this hard for so long in my life! We already sent out the intern to K-Mart twice to buy new underwear!

We’ve spoken with our lawyers. We’ve spoken with Twitter. And we’ve heard what our readers have to say. All of that factors in to our decision on what to post or not to post.

Translation: Gotta make believe we are a “real news” outlet and cover our ass. We want to get PAID, no have to PAY.

We are always in the delicate position of balancing what’s right for the community with publishing insider news that helped build this site into what it is today. We don’t sit around and republish press releases, we break big stories.

Translation: We are getting SO much attention right now! Even Macworld has a story about it now! Dude, I think we can actually triple our ad rates over the next few days on this? Did anyone contact CNN yet?

I feel bad for Twitter and I wish this had never happened.

Translation: HAHAHA! Yeah, right!

But it did happen and the documents are out there and they are going to be published somewhere on the Internet.

Translation: Like, right here! Click those ads, baby, CLICK ‘EM! (Crap, I think I need another pair of Fruity The Looms again…)

Hopefully the embarrassing and sensitive stuff about individual employees will never see the light of day.

Translation: Our lawyers are trying to make sure we don’t get sued when we do publish them. We have to save SOMETHING for next week! Hell, we may even be able to drag this out an entire month! Cha-CHING!

And hopefully this situation will encourage Google and Google users to consider more robust data security policies in the future.

Translation: Keep hacking, people! KEEP HACKING! Baby needs a new paid of shoes!

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