This is an important new change. But in the near future we will be removing support for Flash from our OS X operating system.

This is for all the same reasons that I cited in my essay, “Thoughts on Flash.” Those reasons apply to OS X as well as to iPhone. And let’s go over them again:

1. We’re all about being open. The Mac with OS X is the most open environment ever. Except when it’s running Flash. Thus, goodbye Flash.

2. Hardly any videos use Flash anymore. The ones that do aren’t watching. Take my word on this.

3. Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. Well, not anymore.

4. Battery life. I can’t tell you how many emails I get from people begging me to disable Flash so that their MacBook Pro will run longer. I mean literally I can’t tell you. But it’s a lot. Well, friends, your wish has been granted.

5. Mice. Flash was designed for them. MacBook Pro does not have one.

6. Cross platform. Simply put, our customers do not want a world in which it is easy for developers to write apps that run on many platforms. They want this work to be hard for developers. I don’t know why. You’ll have to ask the customers. We’re just listening to them, and doing what they want.

Conclusions: No more Flash on the Mac. Now let’s celebrate.

Also: As of some day really soon, Gawker Media Web sites will not be supported in Safari, both on iPhone OS and OS X. Purely for technology reasons. Same for advertisements sold by Google. They were fine in the PC era. But now they just look ugly. Our users don’t want them on their Macs.

Also: Under iPhone OS 4.0, certain phone numbers will not work on iPhone, both for incoming and outgoing calls. We won’t tell you which numbers these are, but trust us, they’re not numbers you should be calling, and definitely not numbers you want calling you. If you call us to find out whether a certain number is on our blocked list, we will tell you the following: “That information is not available.”

That is all for now. For a longer explanation of why these changes make sense, stay tuned to John Gruber.

Instead, please think about my latest totally impromptu essay, Thoughts on Flash.

I realize you might be thinking that I just published this “Thoughts on Flash” thing as a way to distract attention from the Gizmodo affair, where, as Jon Stewart put it last night, we look like a bunch of jackbooted “appholes.”

You might be thinking that this whole Flash essay was just a cheesy attempt to bury the Gizmodo “breaking down doors” meme, especially since it’s pretty obvious that we leaked the Flash essay to our Chief Apologist John Gruber and told him to start whipping up some buzz on Twitter about it, and he followed orders.

You might also be thinking that this only makes us look even more manipulative and ridiculous.

If that is what you are thinking, please stop thinking that.

Again, I repeat: This is not what we want you to be thinking.

So please stop thinking about it. Right now.

Please, instead, think about Flash.

Get yourself worked up about Flash. Argue about it. Get angry about it!

And please, as I’ve already said, stop thinking about Gizmodo.

Going forward, if you’re ever in doubt about what you should think about, and you can’t get through to me personally, just read John Gruber’s blog, and he’ll tell you what I want you to think.

Failing that, you can always think about Gandhi, who loves his new iPad and is totally downloading apps like a madman.

And by the way, Gandhi would totally break down your door if you stole something that belonged to him. He would fuck up your shit. Seriously.

Okay.

That is all.

Peace.

It was our private investigators, not us. And they didn’t break in. They just tried to. Actually what happened is they showed up and attempted to intimidate the kid into letting them search through his stuff. Perfectly legal. Perfectly acceptable behavior. There is no law, in California or anywhere else, that says it’s a crime to go to someone’s home and ask them to invite you inside and let you look through their stuff. There just isn’t. Hell, Jehovah’s Witnesses do this all the time. Except for the part about searching through your stuff. But why quibble over details.

Wired.com broke the story. And sure, what they’ve written is correct. Nevertheless we are demanding that they take it down, and if they won’t, we are threatening to reject all Conde Nast apps from the App Store, and to never let anyone from Wired come sit at my feet and ask me fawning questions and write down my phony scripted answers, ever again.

We’re pretty sure they’ll see the light on this.

Meanwhile, for now we’re asking John Gruber to ignore this story and simply pretend he hasn’t seen it or heard about it, and so far he seems to be complying. That’s for now anyway. Katie and her team are working on a version of the “Apple’s goons trying to get into some guy’s house” story that makes us look like the good guys.

We’ll have our side of the story up on Daring Fireball as soon as we can finish thinking it up. Stay tuned.

Poor Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair and Newser. He submitted his lousy application to our App Store, and got rejected. And now all the world must live in fear:

What we have now, suddenly, is one of the most mercurial and paranoid and unusual men in American business—willing to swear out a warrant if you cross him—telling you what you can and cannot read. In other words, the device you may be holding in your hand (my column, perhaps unbeknownst to Apple, is available on the Newser iPhone app) is not necessarily a benign one; the company that makes it not necessarily your friend.

Keep an eye on Daring Fireball to get our side of the story.

He called last night and he’s like, Hey, is there anything I can do? Can we maybe find a way to turn this into a federal crime? Maybe a hate crime thing? Or domestic terrorism? We could put some people in Gitmo and hold them without charges.

I was like, Dude, I thought we’re not doing that anymore. He goes, Uh, nope. We’re still doing that. I said, But wait, didn’t you say during the campaign — and he goes, Yeah, look, let it go, and how about we just rendition them to Cairo and let someone else take care of it, because frankly I’ve always wanted to see Nick Denton with a black bag over his head.

I told him I’d think about it. Enjoy the publicity for now, Nick Denton. You won’t be laughing for long.

Obviously I knew about this when I posted yesterday, but I was waiting to see how long it would take Gizmodo to come clean.

News flash: Cops with a warrant searched the home of reporter-slash-receiver-of-stolen-property Jason Chen and took six computers – three days ago, on Friday night. Gizmodo just gets around to reporting it now. Strange, no?

Gawker’s COO says the warrant was not valid because in California you can’t bust into the house of a reporter and take his stuff. Well, excuse me, but as far as I can tell, that just happened. And do you know why it happened? Because this is my state, Gawker. I make the rules.

Penal code? Please. Cite your little laws all you want. Write memos to the cops. I own the cops. They work for me. So do the judges and the prosecutors.

In case you’re wondering how far we’re going to push this, let me put it this way: Katie asks me to ask you if anyone knows Jason Chen’s waist size, because she wants to buy him a skirt.

Yeah. It’s like that.

Welcome to the jungle, Gawker guys. You merry pranksters got crazy with the wrong dude when you tangled with me. Oh, you had a good laugh. You had a big “scoop.” You thought were all badass, didn’t you?

Well, now it’s my turn. And I will not rest until your entire “empire” is ground to dust under the heel of my running shoe.

To put it another way:

Seriously, get your boss Nick Denton to start teaching you how to take it in the butt. Because the police are ready to pounce, and we are definitely going to do everything we can to make sure you clowns spend time behind bars. My guess is Jason Chen (above) is gonna be a very popular guy when he arrives in prison. He’ll look a lot like he does in the photo, except he’ll be wearing some lipstick, and that thing he’s holding next to his face won’t be an iPhone.

I vill not tolerate haffing mein image abused like a ferret in Goering's underpants!

Goodbye, Hitler! We will miss you! From the great Hilary Clinton in The Bunker to the latest iPad in The Bunker, they’re all getting wiped, as the copyright holders, some uptight Scheißeköpfen in Munich, doesn’t find any of the parodies on YouTube or elsewhere profitable funny. It’s a sign that many things we love and take for granted on the internet are soon coming to an end. Auf Wiedersehen, meine Kinder, bis wir uns wiedersehen!

Like a lot of his fellow Apple employees, John Gruber of Daring Fireball is incensed about Gizmodo taking possession of a stolen iPhone and turning it into a scoop. But Gruber is going a little bit around the bend. He’s been emailing me nonstop, telling me I should have everyone arrested. And here is his latest post, where he makes the case against Gizmodo and the guy who found the phone in the bar, claiming they have all broken the law, that under the California penal code (hoo boy) what they did constitutes theft, and then he loads up some innuendo about how the whole story of “finding” the phone doesn’t make any sense and what if these guys actually followed some Apple engineer and picked his pocket or something, and even if they didn’t do that, they should all be sent to the chair put in prison for life.

Gah. And now Daniel Eran Dilger is weighing in, with a finely crafted 16,000-word essay on the whole thing which basically concludes that, (a) yes, this all happened, and (b) Windows people are stupid assholes who are always conspiring against Apple because we are the one true holy church of technology, and it drives them crazy that we’re so good and they’re so evil. And Andy Ihnatko, another Friend of Apple, says Gizmodo are scum.

I can’t deal with Dilger and Ihnatko — even over email they give me hives. But Gruber I can handle. I keep telling him, John, dude, I love you like a son, but you’re letting this get to you, it’s getting under your skin, you need to let it go, and anyway it’s not up to us to file criminal charges. We can’t do that. So go bug the cops or something. He says he’s done that, but the cops in Redwood City won’t do anything, and now he’s thinking about just making the arrest himself, and if that doesn’t work then he’s going to go to law school and become a lawyer and bring a civil lawsuit against Gawker Media and the finder guy.

Good luck with that.

(Photo by Art Director Jason. Much love.)

Neil Curtis, the guy who put this video together, will be rooming with Gray Powell.