Paging Sheldon Cooper! iCloud censorship hits ‘Big Bang Theory’

Big news out of Palo Alto yesterday, as Facebook totally overhauled its News Feed, turning it into a kind of “personalized newspaper” with bigger photos and video that’s — oh, screw it. I am so completely bored by Facebook’s 3,287th change to its interface I can’t go any further. If you want to learn all about the new News Feed, please read one of the other 19,321 identical reports about it on the InterWebs.

Instead, I’m going to dive into the reader mailbag, where at least there’s a bit more diversity.

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I’ll start with this one from J. F., which might be my all-time favorite. He writes in response to my recent harangue about the sorry state of Web journalism, as it applied to the news “scoop” regarding my four-month-old story about Apple censoring email in the iCloud:

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Your words so needed to be said. Many will not get, and/or never read through to the part of your article about what is wrong with so-called Web journalism today. You’re absolutely correct, and your tracing back the 5W’s of your [barely legal teen] article should from this day forward serve as the pivotal moment in human history of when we became fully aware of what is wrong but also did little or nothing about it. What will our future look like when factual news, gossip and conjecture are indistinguishable from one another?

“Pivotal moment in human history” — damn. I’d like to thank the Nobel Committee …

On that same story, I heard from J. H. at Warner Bros Studio, production coordinator for “The Big Bang Theory.” He writes:

I stumbled upon your article about emails with PDF script attachments disappearing with iCloud. We are experiencing the same issue on our TV show, however we’re using Final Draft. Our script dept uses a Gmail account and several people on our staff & crew, including actors, use iCloud. Do you know if there was a work-around discovered, other than figuring out what phrase in the PDF content might be objectionable?

One thing that apparently worked for my original source, Steven G., was compressing the PDF using Apple’s encrypted .dmg archive format. (Using Zip didn’t work.) The attachment arrived intact with the phrase “[not Virus Scanned]” inserted inside the email subject line.

So that’s now two examples of screenplay writers being nailed by Apple’s prudish spam filter. Did Sheldon Cooper say something nasty about the iPhone? He definitely seems more of an Android guy.

Regarding my piece about ISPs implementing their new “six strikes” copyright alert system, reader T. B. wonders about the legal implications of calling someone a pirate.

It would be interesting to find out if accusing someone of piracy is equivalent to libel. I wonder how many lawsuits it will take for an ISP to retreat from this policy? Whatever, after the first notice I received I will be contacting my ISP. Either expunge the issue or lose me as a subscriber. I’m not going to give an inch to the copyright Gestapo.

Nor I, matey. You also win the prize for first reader to invoke Godwin’s law.

After I wrote about how Chromebooks are kind of the second coming of Netscape, I heard from several Chrome OS fans. Longtime reader and world-class geek S. D. wrote:

In my house, we have four Macs (G4 MacBook, G5 iMac, early Intel MacBook, and a 2012 MacBook Pro 13), plus an Acer netbook that has been modded with 2GB of RAM, a 32GB SSD, and Ubuntu 10.04. The S5 Chromebook probably gets 95 percent of my usage, even though its Atom processor can be frustratingly slow. It will run for 8 to 10 hours off battery, and the 3G capability means I can use it anywhere, anytime. … I choose to use Chrome OS. At this time in the development of Chrome OS, it would be a stretch to make a Chromebook one’s main computer, but it satisfies most of my needs.

I also heard from Cringester H. T., who claims to be one of the few people on earth who actually paid for Netscape back in 1995 and still has a copy of the license. Unfortunately, it only allows him to use the browser in Win 3.1 or Windows 95. (Psst, H.T., some free advice: You might want to think about cleaning out your attic at least once a decade.)

Eagle-eyed reader T.J.M. notes that I flouted the rules of English grammar the other day by misusing the word “flout.” In my post regarding Microsoft being fined $732 million by European regulators and the utter pointlessness of that exercise, I talked about big banks and other corporations that “flaunt the rules.” He writes:

The phrase you were looking for was “flout the rules.” It’s a stripper who flaunts her wares, for instance — or an insufferable know-it-all who flaunts his education, I suppose.

Good thing I wasn’t writing about flautists making flautas. That could have really gotten ugly.

I should add that T.J.M. also called me out in the comments recently for using the word “might” when I should have used “mite” in a post about Apple’s next miracle.

I blame autocorrect. It isn’t actually part of the software I use to compose these screeds, but I’m blaming it anyway. Heck, that’s really the only thing it’s good for.

Flouted any good rules lately? Or flaunted them? Confess your sins (grammatical or otherwise) below or seek expiation here: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Paging Sheldon Cooper! iCloud censorship hits ‘Big Bang Theory’,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.