Occam’s Razor Is Rusty

It’s no stun­ning rev­e­la­tion to reg­u­lar read­ers that I think that there is an appalling lack of crit­i­cal think­ing skills amongst the so-called “experts” who make up the tech press. With very few excep­tions the default process for the tech media seems to be to run sto­ries with­out the slight­est hint of inves­ti­ga­tion, ver­i­fi­ca­tion, or even inde­pen­dent thought. Case in point, a story that began mak­ing the rounds last week about Apple exert­ing it’s DRACONIAN CONTROL to remove all WiFi “snif­fer” appli­ca­tions. A typ­i­cally crap­tac­u­lar exam­ple of the “report­ing” sur­round­ing the issue can be found in this arti­cle at the Cult of Mac blog. To quote:

Apple sent a note to the devel­oper of WiFi-Where on Wednesday say­ing their app has been removed because it uses “a pri­vate frame­work to access wifi information.”

What this pri­vate frame­work is, nei­ther Apple nor the devel­oper explain.

The prob­lem is the sec­ond sen­tence. Apple, of course isn’t explain­ing what the “pri­vate frame­work” is, because Apple hasn’t offered any fuck­ing com­ment on this sit­u­a­tion. Nor should they. Apple rejects hun­dreds of appli­ca­tions a week. They owe expla­na­tions to the devel­op­ers, but not to ran­dom blog­gers and jour­nal­ists. More impor­tantly though, Apple did explain why they shit-canned the apps. They “use pri­vate frame­works.” Now, remem­ber that all of this com­mu­ni­ca­tion is being relayed though the devel­op­ers them­selves, but it should be blind­ingly obvi­ous to any­one styling them­selves “experts” in iPhone related mat­ters that “pri­vate frame­work” means the same thing as non-public APIs. Regardless of the idiocy being pro­mul­gated by fools like Erica Sadun, using non-public APIs in iPhone appli­ca­tions is specif­i­cally for­bid­den by the iPhone Developer Agreement. Nothing that Apple is doing here is in the least bit “suspicious.”

If this sort of fuzzy think­ing was rel­e­gated to just the usual link-bait blog­gers it would be one thing. The prob­lem is that this meme has been co-opted by other reporters and pun­dits who should damn well know bet­ter. I’m not talk­ing about legit­i­mate debates over whether Apple’s con­trol of the App Store is overly restric­tive. I’m talk­ing about oth­er­wise intel­li­gent peo­ple who are will­fully ignor­ing the dif­fer­ence between Apple enforc­ing (albeit belat­edly) one of the few hard-and-fast rules that the App Store has and them arbi­trar­ily ban­ning tit­tie apps. It’s hon­estly infuriating.

During one of the early Angry Mac Bastards pod­casts, my man Peter Cohen screamed the fol­low­ing phrase. “OCCAM’S FUCKING RAZOR QUINCY, HAVE YOU HEARD OF IT?” I des­per­ately need to extract that clip and start spam­ming it to the peo­ple per­pet­u­at­ing the con­spir­acy the­ory model of Apple’s busi­ness prac­tices. Seriously you lack-wits, the sim­plest expla­na­tion really is usu­ally the right one. Sadly that means that I have to go with the the­ory that the major­ity of the tech media are just crim­i­nally incom­pe­tent, rather than my pre­ferred the­ory that they are part of a Reptilliod advanced mis­sion to drive the rest of us insane, but so be it.