Admittedly, the sources are anonymous, but could one expect otherwise given the material? I also appreciate the piece's directness, which is a refreshing contrast to the mealy-mouthed, there-is-no-truth-only-opposing-opinions cowardice of the MSM. (Of course, if you're going to say outright that someone is lying you had better be sure you are right.)

By the way, was the Techcrunch story on Last.fm definitively discredited? (That's not a troll - I don't follow these things very closely and am sincerely curious.) I was under the impression that it was left in an ambiguous state with both sides insisting they were right.

I stopped being OK with TechCrunch when they went after Blaine Cook personally for Twitter's reliability issues.

I can point out lots of random incidents that have caused me to write off TechCrunch (Last.fm being the most prominent). But those are just symptoms. The disease is replacing the profession of journalism with clowns like Arrington. The pathology that results is "publications" with:

* No sourcing policies

* No retraction policies

* No conflict of interest controls

* No separation between editorial and reporting

You're better off with a Murdoch paper than with TechCrunch. At least the WSJ does great reporting outside the editorial pages. Here you're disputing whether there's a non-knee-jerk reason to dislike TechCrunch, over a story in which Arrington uses anonymous sources to assert that Apple is acting quasi-unlawfully, in part over behavior that Arrington simply doesn't like. You couldn't get this published in a column in a mainstream paper.

I'd forgotten about that. You're right, that was awful.

Edit: I like pop songs. At least Bleach had one.

Edit 2: Did you know that the WSJ is Noam Chomsky's favorite newspaper?

And I don't know if there's that much difference between them and the Times (except Editorials, of course) anymore. Both have very few real "reporters" who do even the basics of journalism, such as checking facts and assertions for correctness and not just "he said, she said"...

From the language of Apple's statement it is fairly obvious they are being weaselly about the meaning of the word "reject" in addition to being dishonest about what the Google voice app actually does. This whole response reads like a carefully crafted PR statement. I love Apple products but they've really managed to dig themselves into a hole here.

That's like saying "I didn't eat the cookie from the cookie jar; I was really hungry and it was delicious."

I do get tired of bloggers disputing what should be fact by mixing it with rumors or secondary sources...

[techcrunch quote]: "The first part of Apple’s argument, that they never rejected the application, is “a total lie,” according to many sources with knowledge of the Google Voice application process." ... "There is overwhelming evidence that Apple did in fact reject the application."

[daringfireball quote]: "Google’s initial statement regarding this did not use the word rejected either. Their spokesperson told TechCrunch: “Apple did not approve the Google Voice application we submitted six weeks ago to the Apple App Store.”"

Who is trying to mislead us here? Techcrunch throws unnamed "overwhelming evidence" and unnamed "sources" at my face, while daringfireball talks about Google's "initial" statement. Was there a second or third statement that cleared things up?

Anybody have the facts?

  re⋅ject
  3. to refuse to accept (someone or something);
  source: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/reject

However, there is a big difference between an app being still under review and being rejected.

Arrington's language claiming that Apple's answer to the FCC was "a total lie" reminds me of Dick Cheney talking about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There's "overwhelming evidence"? And that's enough for you to accuse Apple of lying to the FCC on TechCrunch? Obviously not all journalists hold themselves to the same standards.

Google's response at the time sounded pretty final: "We will continue to work to bring our services to iPhone users, for example, by taking advantage of advances in mobile browsers."

The companies that get reported on are no better with their "We definitely won't be doing X" and then they do X.

I think this story isn't grounded very well but there's a kind of precedent with Apple's DRM play with iTunes.

Yes, there's a preset icon for both Yahoo and Gmail but iPhone supported push email for Yahoo mail accounts, still does, and still does not have push email from Google.

To get Yahoo push email working before the 3.0 with "push" for everyone, Apple allowed Yahoo's mail a feature only shared on the iPhone by the MobileMe subscription service.