Enderlee  is now officially insane:

Apple’s Jobs: Rock star of Corporate America – MarketWatch.

1) David Pogue wrote a critique of the American cell phone industry – State of the Art: The Irksome Cellphone Industry.

2) The CEO of Verizon wrote a letter to the publisher of the New York Times.

3) Pogue published the letter today, in a blog post called “The Cell Phone Industry Strikes Back”, but it has mysteriously disappeared from the New York Times website. I assume under legal threat from Verizon.

Link (non-functioning) for the disappeared piece.

I found the text of the disappeared letter on this blog:Intomobile – “Verizon Wireless CEO responds to David Pogue’s article on the American mobile industry”.

For example, in this brief post, he says:

But it rings untrue to most ears to claim that Apple is doing a bad job with regard to security. The evidence suggests that Mac OS X has been and remains secure enough to be safe, and safety is what real people actually care about.

Now, I just read a blog post earlier today by Gruber’s arch-nemesis, Rixstep:

The point Rick summarizes most succinctly, that doesn’t seem to get much press:

As reported by members of the Rixstep/7 forum.

bash seems to be about two years old.
bzip2 is still at version 1.0.4 which is a year old.
rsync is still at version 2.6.x which is three years old.
Most rsync updates since 2006 were security updates.
X11 is still 2.1.6 although X.org released 2.3.3 three weeks ago.
History and numerous hacker contests have proven the best, easiest, fastest, and most reliable way to hack Mac OS X is to compare version numbers of open source modules, find one or more that are egregiously unconscionably out of date, and read the change logs at the source. From that point the hack’s child’s play.

This is why once a year the Macbook gets hacked and won in 5 minutes while it takes longer to get the Vista or XP machine. Gruber’s conclusion sounds like Microsoft ad copy: “safety is what real people people actually care about.” WTF?

Apple seems ignorant, or more likely arrogant when it comes to implementing timely security fixes for the open-source underpinnings of its operating system. “Ringing untrue to most ears” means absolutely nothing.

My gut feeling is that we’ve seen the last Steve Jobs keynote address. I don’t think he’s leaving the company — and his medical leave has been scheduled to run through the end of June — but I wonder if he’s done as the company’s spokesman.

I have to disagree. Given that the Stevenotes are one of his superpowers, and make full use of the reality distortion field, I think that Gruber is crazy to think he won’t do them anymore. Idiotic, in fact. What I do think is gone are the days when he will run them 75-100% by himself. I think he’ll do the main presentation, emcee as it were, and let the other members of the team take up the rest.

My prediction: Jobs will make a public appearance in July, having added weight since we last saw him, and he will at least introduce the new iPods come September/October.

Social Networking is not Marketing; but the inability to grasp that fact is the defining characteristic of the New Media Douchebag. To a NMD like Scoble, every interaction; from posting a Twitter update, to talking to a person in a bar, to uploading a picture of their cat is an opportunity to promote the semi-mythical “personal brand” that they’ve built around themselves. This is something that makes the New Media Douchebags almost tragic figures to me; and is the main reason why I don’t bag on them as much as I could.

So, then Ihnatko comments on Ateş’s post: “Good catch on the iPod. The rest I think are a matter of opinion.” I agree with Faruk – calling the iTunes Store a “matter of opinion” sounds like the cream in someone’s Boston Creme Pie went sour.

The thing that made me write that post in the first place was that I expected Macworld to be somewhat professional, and write an email or call somebody or spend some time on a decent web search; that is, to perform a little research.

Well, the prize goes to CNET for actually doing some journalism and research, I have to call out practically everyone else for merely participating in a blogging echo chamber. My biggest problem with all of this is that all of the attributions go to Macworld, and not Kirkville. I guess the fact that McElhearn writes occasionally for Macworld somehow means that makes sense, but then again, he didn’t submit it to Macworld as a post for their site.

Anyway, the CNET piece by Greg Sandoval is really the best of the bunch:

And the culprit here is a system that for decades has pumped billions of dollars into the coffers of Hollywood studios and the television industry. What has happened is Apple and Netflix have crashed into windows. “Release windows” is the term used to describe periods of time a certain type of media is allowed to show a movie. Typically, a feature film is first released in theaters, then on DVD, followed by pay-per-view channels and finally on broadcast TV.

To reiterate the lessons learned, licensing is fluid, particularly movie licensing, and there is nothing to be alarmed about, such as the NBC/Universal debacle of 2007-8. Rather, they like to keep themselves busy by allowing licensing and taking it away. This creates the illusion of work and justifies the salaries of the executives at these companies.

As far as quality of comments go, I will give a tie to CNET and the second Ars Technica piece for quality. Meanwhile, a tardy bell for Cult of Mac for bringing up the rear, as it were, coming in last with nothing new to say.

Timeline of Posts

December 5
Kirkville : Where Have All the iTunes Store Movies Gone?. References: Original story.

Macworld: Movies disappearing from iTunes Store without a trace. References: Kirkville.

pooter.net/blog : iTunes Store Movie Disappearances – examined. References: Kirkville, Macworld.

December 8
Ars Technica – Infinite Loop (Justin Berka) : Certain movies disappearing from iTunes Store, cause unknown. References: Macworld.

December 9
CNET : TV has license to kill movies at iTunes, Netflix. References: Macworld, Original reporting!

December 10
AppleInsider : TV deals causing movies to disappear from iTunes Store. References: Macworld, CNET.

AllThings D : Now Not Showing at iTunes and Netflix: Some of Your Favorite Movies. References: CNET.

ZDNET – Apple Core (Jason O’Grady) : Studios throw the kill switch on Apple and Netflix. References: Macworld, CNET

Ars Technica – Infinite Loop (Jeff Smykil) : Disappearing iTunes Store movies: case closed?

Daring Fireball : “This is the sort of stupidity that drives even those who want to be honest customers toward bootlegging.” References: CNET.

December 11
Cult of Mac : Solved: Hollywood Behind Vanishing iTunes Movies. References: CNET

No comments on the original post, but Macworld picked it up – here, without adding anything. My first reaction was, ‘oh, that’s sloppy journalism.’ Particularly when you see the commenters doing the research, which I’ll summarize in a moment below. However, it made me realize two things: 1) they gave the issue a lot more eyeballs, and 2) Even ‘professional’ blogging is, well, just sloppy, compared to older school journalism. By this I mean no research, no checking sources, nothing much more than what’s off the top of your head. This is hardly the nightmare of ‘What I had for lunch today’ which was regularly lampooned back when blogging was first making it into the major media 5 years ago, but I wish the Macworld poster would have done just a little research before pushing the ‘Publish’ button. Oh well.

Anyway, if we want to look at things positively, we can see the Macworld post as a postive example of crowdsourcing, something which overall I have problems with, but I will save that for another post. In short: the commenters did the work here. Commenter DougAdams pulls out a relevant quote from AppleTVJunkie.com:

Why do movies seem to disappear from Apple TV?
No one knows for certain but we believe that it is a combination of the studios pulling titles at their discretion and the newer movie release title rights reverting over to premium cable channels such as HBO, Showtime and Starz. So once it’s time for the movies to premiere on those channels they become purchase only titles or disappear altogether.

Subsequently, commenter fletc3her notes that Netflix streaming lists the dates when some content will no longer be available. This is an important piece of information, and belies the complexity of the licensing issues surrounding Kirk’s original question, and also points out that Netflix is a little bit more forthcoming than Apple when it comes to explanatory dialog boxes.

Finally, commenter encampbe did the logical thing and looked up Kirk’s list on Amazon.com streaming, finding that

While the movies are all found, they are all listed as “currently not available.” Clicking on them brings up the regular video screen, but in the middle, instead of the preview, the following message appears: “Due to our licensing agreements, this video is currently not available for purchase or rental.

So, in sum, it appears to be a question of fluid content licensing, rather than the possibility of some negative video content migration off of the iTunes Store. Props to the nice job done by Macworld’s commenters!