Press releases can be disingenuously upbeat and straight-jacketed. From the hip snark this over the top is just as bad. Even innocuous statements in the release are torn apart. What a joke.
Amongst other things it's been used many times previously to take apart the justifications that are often written to explain why a company's stupid moves aren't really stupid.
The "high as a kite" line is somewhat obligatory and comes from the sadly-departed Mark Pilgrim's skewering of Joel Spolsky, who was trying to tell everyone that IE8 was going to be a really good web browser when it came to implementing web standards, and that the standards didn't really matter much anyway. You can relive this moment from web history here: http://web.archive.org/web/20110514122550/http://diveintomar...
"I have to be honest: I don't use the Internet. I've never seen a blog in my life. I don't even use email, I don't waste my time with this. I am not interested. I couldn't care less. I think the Internet has become a hate machine for a lot of people and I want nothing to do with it." [1]
Robert Fisk seems to equate the Web with the Internet. You can't really blame him.
One thing that bothers me and that I do consider disingenuous is how every denial is specific ("not recording keystrokes"), while every affirmative statement of what they actually do is vague ("look at many aspects of a device's performance"). Oh really? Like what? Tell us exactly what gets sent to the carrier. Even if it varies by carrier, list some of the top things among all of them.
> It's called humor. It may not be appropriate on HN [...]
Humor, or as in this case snarky look-at-my-clever-phrasing passed off as humor, is no excuse for writing pointless shit. The article offers no insight or useful discussion.
> [...] neither is bitching about it every time the source is you-know-who.
andrewvc was only complaining that the article was bad in and of itself.
Press releases can be disingenuously upbeat and straight-jacketed. From the hip snark this over the top is just as bad. Even innocuous statements in the release are torn apart. What a joke.