Remember the iPhone 4 scandal? No, not the
one about how it loses reception when hold it a certain way. The
scandal before that one. The one about the prototype iPhone “lost” in a
Silicon Valley bar, sold to gadget blog Gizmodo, and revealed online
months before its official release.
Gizmodo received mega-traffic after the leak, but it
paid a price: Apple called the cops and the San Mateo County district attorney’s office
opened an investigation into how a blogger ended up with an unreleased
cell phone in his lap. Things came to a head when blogger Jason Chen,
who spearheaded the coverage, found his home raided and his technology
equipment seized by the police.
His equipment has been impounded
ever since.
Until
now, anyway, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Gizmodo said
Monday that it reached an agreement with investigators and will
cooperate with the inquiry. The terms indicate that Gawker will provide
materials relevant to the case (as deemed so by a court appointee), on a
piece-by-piece basis, and he’ll get his equipment back. The blogging
operation has argued — as have many civil libertarians — that it’s
inappropriate and possibly illegal to seize a reporter’s equipment with a
simple search warrant. (As the Wall Street Journal notes, those
warrants can’t be challenged in court.)
The investigation is,
somewhat bizarrely, still ongoing. Certainly someone could have sussed
out the identity of the seller of the “lost” iPhone by now, no?
Or
perhaps their calls to him are getting dropped because someone is
holding the phone the wrong way