iPods may play flicks, SCO up to old tricks

My prickly yet paranoid editor can’t believe I could be this happy without a job offer in my pocket. I swear he’s having me followed. I’m starting to feel like I did something heinous, like unveil a covert CIA agent or leak Apple trade secrets.

The vids are all right: The Wall Street Journal has predicted a September release for a video iPod. While Apple plays deaf-and-dumb, Cringester John H. notes that when you try to reach www.apple.com/movies, you get a “Forbidden — You don’t have permission to access /movies on this server” error instead of Apple’s typical “Page Not Found” message. You can usually tell an Apple rumor is true by the flock of attorneys slowly circling the rumor blogs. So far the skies are clear, but they may have turned on their cloaking devices.

Smoking gun control: Groklaw has published an August 2002 e-mail to SCO chief Darl “Dark Side” McBride stating that an SCO investigation failed to produce evidence of Unix copyright infringement in Linux. SCO countered by producing a 1999 memo claiming Linux did too steal Unix code, so neener-neener (or something like that). I bet they had to rent Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine to find that chestnut.

Nothing to crow about: When Dell closed its Customer Care forums on July 8, critics claimed it was trying to clamp down on the boards’ “Dell Hell” messages (1,701 at last count). Dell says it was just trying to protect customers’ privacy and route their questions to the right reps. At press time Dell had just reopened its “General (Non-Technical)” forum for comments — though the phrase “Dell Hell” has been mysteriously banned. In other news, the company hired spokesinger Sheryl Crow to croon her new single “Good Is Good (and Bad Is Bad)” on its TV spots. Hmm, I wonder which one Dell is?

Starbucks sawbucks: Cringeman Chris G. recently completed an online quiz from Hewlett-Packard, making him eligible to win a gift card from Starbucks worth $10 — almost enough for a grande double latte. Now that HP CEO Mark Hurd is slashing thousands of jobs, they can probably spare the 10-spot.

Got hot tips or video-pod prototypes? Send them to cringe@infoworld.com; you may earn a bag for your efforts.