Press releases can be disingenuously upbeat and straight-jacketed. From the hip snark this over the top is just as bad. Even innocuous statements in the release are torn apart. What a joke.
Amongst other things it's been used many times previously to take apart the justifications that are often written to explain why a company's stupid moves aren't really stupid.
The "high as a kite" line is somewhat obligatory and comes from the sadly-departed Mark Pilgrim's skewering of Joel Spolsky, who was trying to tell everyone that IE8 was going to be a really good web browser when it came to implementing web standards, and that the standards didn't really matter much anyway. You can relive this moment from web history here: http://web.archive.org/web/20110514122550/http://diveintomar...
"I have to be honest: I don't use the Internet. I've never seen a blog in my life. I don't even use email, I don't waste my time with this. I am not interested. I couldn't care less. I think the Internet has become a hate machine for a lot of people and I want nothing to do with it." [1]
Robert Fisk seems to equate the Web with the Internet. You can't really blame him.
One thing that bothers me and that I do consider disingenuous is how every denial is specific ("not recording keystrokes"), while every affirmative statement of what they actually do is vague ("look at many aspects of a device's performance"). Oh really? Like what? Tell us exactly what gets sent to the carrier. Even if it varies by carrier, list some of the top things among all of them.
> It's called humor. It may not be appropriate on HN [...]
Humor, or as in this case snarky look-at-my-clever-phrasing passed off as humor, is no excuse for writing pointless shit. The article offers no insight or useful discussion.
> [...] neither is bitching about it every time the source is you-know-who.
andrewvc was only complaining that the article was bad in and of itself.
"Update: chpwn notes that initial research indicated that Carrier IQ's software may only be active when the iPhone is in diagnostic mode. In a blog post, chpwn confirms that, based on his initial testing, Apple has added some form of Carrier IQ software to all versions of iOS, including iOS 5. However, the good news is that it does not appear to actually send any information so long as a setting called DiagnosticsAllowed is set to off, which is the default. Finally, the local logs on iOS seem to store much less information than what has been seen on Android, limited to some call activity and location (if enabled), but not any text from the web browser, SMS, or anywhere else. We'll let you know when more details arise."
"Good investigative work by Grant “chpwn” Paul. iOS includes a Carrier IQ daemon, but it doesn’t seem to log any particularly sensitive information. Nothing like a keylogger or reading SMS messages. He’s documenting his research on Twitter as he goes." [1]
It's unnecessary to do a 180 (or 360, if he should end up in the same place) because this article isn't about iOS vs. Android or closed vs. open. This is about some company being disingenuous as to what their software does and cowering behind a misleading press release.
Everything that Gruber produces has the ulterior motive of colouring Apple good / competitors bad. I find it all extremely boring.