Boycott Mac Heist. It really is that simple.
As if they didn't already have a bit of a reputation in some parts, it seems the people behind MacHeist have really decided to sink as low as they can this year.
If you're involved with MacHeist in any way, I'd like to take a moment to thank you. I wondered if you were all as big a bunch of tossers as I suspected and you have now removed any doubt in my mind. So thanks.
To anyone else who owns a Mac: Please don't have anything to do with Mac Heist. Here's why...
It appears that this year's marketing gimmic for these guys was to approach several Mac web and blog sites and ask them to participate in a scheme whereby the MacHeist crew took over their websites to post whatever promotional material they liked.
Sadly, what they 'liked' was a fake "this website is hacked" page. Pretending to be a hacker named Malcor, these tools claimed to have hacked various mac community websites on the grounds that the community is too smug for its own good and needed to be taken down a peg (hmmm).
It seems that one blogger fairly quickly pegged what was going on and spotted that this was a cheap publicity stunt, but this was quickly denied by "Malcor" on "his" site. One of the "attacked" websites, MacApper, got far enough into the stunt that they posted a very strange and very angry post claiming that they were hacked, no really they were, honest.
Today, the story of the "hacks" finally breaks on the register, and the company behind the blogging tool powering Glenn Wolsey's CORRECTION (sorry about that) the AppleMatters site is forced to deny that their software is vulnerable.
I'm Angry with MacHeist and the people who went along with their crackpot idea for a number of reasons:
It's irresponsible:
We have enough computer security issues to deal with without having to chase our tails looking at made up ones.
It's inconsiderate of others:
The impact to wordpress and ExpressionEngine and their users of a vulnerability could be considerable in terms of time and expenses lost trying to patch a hole in software and deal with the damage to their reputation that being caught out this way can bring.
It is highly irresponsible of MacHeist and their co-conspirators to inflict this expense on those people and those companies for the sake of a childish joke and some free PR.
It diminishes the integrity of similar websites:
There has been considerable debate in the past about whether or not bloggers are journalists in some way. I've tended to stay out of this for a number of reasons, the chief of which being that I felt the whole question was astonishingly pretentious and that the idea that simply posting to a website on a regular basis gave you the rights and responsibilities of a journalist (such as they are) was patently absurd. However, not everyone agrees with me, or else the question would never have arisen.
If you want people to take your opinions seriously, you must behave in a responsible and serious manner. That isn't to say that you can't have a joke every now and again, but rather that you need to have limits and ethics that define your limits; what you will or won't say, what you will or won't do, what you will or will not become involved in. Remember the Microsoft "Laptops for Bloggers" scandal?
Microsoft did harm to themselves with this stunt because of how it was perceived by some bloggers, and those bloggers who accepted the laptops certainly harmed their own reputations. Ironically, if we're talking about bloggers aspiring to journalistic integrity, the "Laptops for Bloggers" stunt echoes precisely what goes on between large companies and 'old-media publisher' journalists all the time and Microsoft were simply guilty of believing the bloggers who claimed they were big boys and girls who could be treated like real journalists.
This is the problem with these sites who participated in the stunt. By taking part in such a cheap trick they have shown that they cannot be trusted to behave in a responsible manner. This might be forgivable for any personal blogs or websites that took part in this but is totally at odds with what you should expect from any other kind of site.
The sad thing is that not only have these people chosen to tarnish themselves, but also by acting in that way they've tarnished the rest of us too. I can't blame MacHeist for this in the same way I can't blame a dog for urinating on a lampost - it simply doesn't know any better. But the sites that took part have damaged their own credibility for sure, and haven't done the rest of us who operate similar sites any favours either. Thanks a lot folks.
UPDATE
Couple of other blogs with interesting opinions on this have started to surface. I'm sure we won't be the only ones with something to say. Inside stretch posts about how MacHeist seems to think its all a big joke and Robinadr's blog notes how sad it is that any of the people concerned couldn't seem to think about any consequences their behaviour might have. Too true.