From: "Rich Gauszka" 

The problem was that Engadget is a pretty good/reliable  site for
information. They were duped as were many Apple employees by an apparent
internal Apple email that was relayed to them by a trusted source.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/17/regarding-yesterdays-apple-news/

About an hour and 40 minutes after the initial memo went out, a second memo
was sent to the same internal Apple lists, dismissing the first. Soon
after, our source -- who we'd been in contact with through the morning --
let us know that Apple was dismissing this earlier email; the second memo
passed off the first as "fake" and "not from Apple".
Fake indeed, but it still came from someone familiar with Apple's internal
mail systems, lists, memo composition structure, etc., who found a way to
plant a phony memo in the inboxes of who knows how many Apple employees.
(Both emails are published in the original post.) Why Apple took nearly two
hours to respond to the situation we do not know.

The person or persons behind the phony email had apparently put one over on
Apple employees to the extent that those employees who received that memo
and passed it along to us and others took it as truth -- as did we.
Although we made sure to confirm and reconfirm with our source that this
email was legit at the time it was sent out, unfortunately no amount of
vetting and confirming sources can account for what happens when a
corporate memo turns out to be fraudulently produced and distributed in
this way.

So who sent the memo, and why? We don't know, and we're not sure we ever
will. Again, it was not a public memo, and it was not distributed outside
Apple's internal Bullet News list to employees. Ultimately we did the only
thing we felt right in doing after the initial post: leave it up unedited
(but struck through), making sure the developing situation was made as
lucid as possible for anyone involved in order to minimize the damages the
leaked email caused.

Credibility and trust is the currency of our realm, and it's clear we lost
some of that. (And to be 100% clear, no one at Engadget is allowed to own
stock in any of the companies we write about.) We take what we do very
seriously and would never knowingly pass along information that we believed
could be false or inaccurate; in this case, as stated above, we had
confirmation from within Apple that this was in fact information that been
distributed via Apple's internal corporate email system. If we had had any
inkling that ANYONE could have exploited that system that would have
greatly affected how we proceeded.


"Mark"  wrote in message
news:464d0cb6$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> "Within minutes, some people who read the post were selling their
> Apple stock,"
>
> Fools.
>
> It has nothing to do with "bloggers" vs.
"legitimate" reporting, it goes
> to common sense and 2nd sourcing everything -- blogs are more often a 2nd
> source for what the real story is, but it can work in reverse just as well
> (and that direction will become more commonplace if the MSM wants to
> survive).
>
> Bloggers are like the pamphleteers of yore, you have to follow them and
> evaluate them on an individual basis -- sure there's going to be erroneous
> material from many (even most if you will) but once you have a feel for a
> particular guy's point of view you can easily parse what makes sense and
> what doesn't  check even those you trust before you buy in>
>
>
> "Rich Gauszka"  wrote in message
> news:464ce95f$1{at}w3.nls.net...
>>
>> blogger power?
>>
>> http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/05/did_anyone_else.ht
ml
>>
>> It's stories like this that make bloggers cringe. Yesterday, tech blog
>> Engadget received supposed insider information about a delay of the
>> iPhone until October, and another delay for Leopard, pushing the new OS
>> to January of 2008. Duty bound to report to its readers, it filed a post.
>> Within minutes, some people who read the post were selling their Apple
>> stock, which dipped 3% in mid-day trading yesterday. The origin of the
>> information was an internal Apple memo...which turned out to be fake.
>> Fake or not, Apple's market capitalization sunk by $4 billion once the
>> memo became public.
>>
>> Some are crying for an SEC investigation. According to a Business 2.0
>> blog, one shareholder sold 5 million shares within 10 to 15 minutes of
>> seeing the post. The post was based on this language seen in the fake
>> memo:
>>
>>     Apple issued a press release today announcing that iPhone which was
>> scheduled to ship in June, has been moved to October and the release date
>> for Mac OS X Leopard has been moved to January next year.
>>
>> Apparently the email came from what Engadget calls a "trusted
source" and
>> was delivered from within Apple's internal email system, giving it the
>> air of authenticity. Apple discovered the fake email quickly and 90
>> minutes later sent out a real email explaining that the first one was a
>> fake:
>>
>>     "This communication is fake and did not come from Apple.
Apple is on
>> track to ship iPhone in late June and Mac OS X Leopard in
October," said
>> Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris.
>>
>> Too late. The damage had already been done. Luckily, the turmoil was
>> brief. The stock recovered most of its value by the end of the day (it
>> closed down 0.17%). There are still a lot of questions that remain
>> unanswered. Who really sent the memo? How did they do it from within the
>> Apple system? Did they hack in? We can only assume that Apple is hunting
>> down the responsible party and will take appropriate action once that
>> person is found.
>>
>> As a blogger, it's often hard to separate the wheat from the chaff in the
>> online world, especially when "scooping" the competition
is top of mind.
>> From Engadget's point of view, I can understand why they would put up
>> their original post based on the supposed good quality source material.
>> What are bloggers to do, however, when fed erroneous information that
>> looks real? Their gut instinct is to post first, question later. Lessons
>> learned in Journalism 101, however, would have prevented the debacle. It
>> never hurts to pick up the phone and call a company rep to confirm the
>> validity of the information. Will this delay the story? Sure. But in the
>> end, accuracy is more important than being the first to report a story.
>
>

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