What a day! While Apple was busy announcing, relatively speaking, nothing at MacWorld, 4Chan, the bad boys of the Internet, went ahead and hacked MacRumors’ live coverage of the show; Twitter freaked out, which is to be expected. Hardly confusing wrechedness.
It is, however, another high profile “hack,” following Facebook’s and Twitter’s own problems with phishing in recent days. (How people still fall for phishing, I don’t know.) That said, I can’t help but think that many of my fellow Apple watchers went overboard with their reaction to the hack.
Shortly after the keynote began, vandalism started to appear in MacRumors’ commentary. It was mainly childish nonsense—I can understand how people might think the Steve Jobs lines were insensitive, though—that, while annoying, isn’t worth losing any sleep over. (This comment on MacRumor’s message board made me laugh: “The folks who hacked in are straight up losers who have nothing better to do with their pathetic lives.” Casting stones, I see! What is so noble, then, about reading a live stream of a series of product announcements?)
The only people that should be upset is the MacRumors crew, primarily because MacWorld, one would think, is their biggest day of the year; Lord knows their advertisers won’t be too thrilled to learn that the site was so terribly insecure, and have subsequently been associated with this tomfoolery. But for everyone else, the people who reacted as if the sun suddenly ran out of helium hydrogen, chill out. (Edit: I should be tarred and feathered; maybe we’ll make a contest out of it.) You were briefly, marginally inconvenienced; you had to wait a few more minutes, or visit another site, to learn that iWork now lets you share documents, for a fee.
In summary: calm down, friends.