Dear Gruber: You’ve been pwned


As the evil shitbags at Valleywag point out here, perhaps the most satisfying aspect of this whole hassle over Google Voice and our recent admission that we (not AT&T) were the ones who rejected that app, is the fact that we finally managed to punk John Gruber of Daring Fireball, big-time. For the sake of context, keep in mind that we hate all members of the media, and we especially hate bloggers. We’ve tried shutting them down and suing them, but that didn’t work out so well, so we’ve now resorted to Plan B, which involves reaching out to them with anonymous sources and feeding them shit information and destroying their credibility. Thing is, Gruber isn’t your average moronic blogger. He’s a little bit smarter than most, and if you don’t believe me, just ask him, because he’ll be glad to tell you. Yeah. It’s like that. To be sure, he’s not as obnoxious as Goatberg — but give him time. Anyway, we can’t just feed this dipshit a steady stream of ridiculous bullshit and fake product prototypes like we do with some of the others. No, with Gruber we had to play a more subtle game. The advantage we had was that he’s basically a fanboy and his tendency is to serve as an apologist for us, no matter what we do. If it came out that we were stealing babies and grinding them up to make iPods, Gruber would find a way to say that somehow the babies had it coming. Nevertheless, we had to cultivate him. So we fed him some real information, and let him get a few scoops, so the fanboys would start to trust him. We made him think that he’s truly “wired in,” with the best inside sources in the business. And then, bam! We feed him a line about how the Google Voice rejection was all AT&T’s idea. We don’t do this directly. We feed it to one of our guys, who feeds it to someone outside, who feeds it to Gruber. No real journalist would ever run a story based on junk like this, but remember — this is the great genius John Gruber! So he swims right into the trap and runs a blog post here saying that a “reliable little birdie” has told him this was AT&T’s idea, not Apple’s. He repeated his defense of us here. Then we wait a few weeks and we nail him.

Thing is, we knew we had Gruber fully hypnotized last December when he went to bat for us over my health issues. Remember when I was still claiming that my health was fine? We fed that to CNBC’s Jim Goldman, hoping to refute a report in Gizmodo that I was knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door. Gruber made a point of siding with CNBC, for no good reason. So that’s when we knew we had him. But we didn’t spring our trap back then. No, we waited. And waited. We toyed with him like a cat plays with mouse. Now we’ve nailed him, and he’s wringing his hands and eating fecal matter and trying to figure out how on earth he could have got this story so wrong. Um, dude? You ran a story based on a single anonymous source. That’s a recipe for getting pwned, which is why you may have noticed that real newspapers have this crazy rule against doing it. Anyway, hope there are no hard feelings, dicknose. Now get back into trance and start pleasuring yourself while looking at photos of me. We’re going to have more stuff for you to lie about for us in the near future. Okay? Peace out.