Video of the undercover reporter being escorted from DEF CON was posted and it revealed a couple of things.

1) associate producer doing the walk of shame
2) nerds aren’t above a bit of schadenfreude
3) nerd’s can take the high road, they’ll turn into huge dorks and heckle like common paparazzi

I have respect for the guy just taking photos, he was capturing the moment. Unfortunately, the other nerds just made her feel bad by calling her names. Sure some person shouted out “This is for all those helpless predators” but that didn’t help summarize why whole venture was unjust.

Michelle Madigan wisely kept quiet and let the dorks shout rhetoric. Had they asked serious questions about her intentions and those of NBC, her silence would have rang as an admission of guilt. Instead, the hoard shouted quips making for a better YouTube clip but clearly showed that they were more interested in revenge rather than justice.

The undercover associate producer Michelle Madigan was outed at this year’s DEF CON. Sent by Dateline NBC, she was to uncover the supposedly seedy underworld of the hacker community. Clearly violating the gestalt of the convention and turning down a proper press credential, her intent was to tattle on hackers by acting like one of them. Do the masses think that identity theft, viruses, and unsolicited email swirl stem from the congregation of these hackers? If NBC did indeed catch someone admitting to a hacker crime, is there evidence to back up the claim?

In my mind, if NBC had their way the piece would start off with a sepia toned shot of a kid in a t-shirt and denim (maybe shorts, it is Las Vegas in the Summer). A slow pan starting at the casual shoes up to his face which has a familiar black bar over his eyes, while a voice-over perhaps Michelle Madigan herself, asking if you knew where your personal information is going as it travels over the Internet. What would come next is a distorted voice, owning up to a breach in security, then a freeze frame. A serious voice would tease the story by giving out statistics of identity theft or PC infections, and this would carry the telecast into 22 minutes of hysteria.

Had this story been aired, what would the public have done with this information? Would the people of Kansas (Michelle’s touchstone to middle America) come down to Las Vegas to protest the convention? Personally, I think people would just throw up their hands and say, “I don’t know anything about computers” and move on. As for the kid that was filmed for the piece, he would be ridiculed to no end. Probably shunned, hacked, and farked into Internet super-humiliation.

Jump to ZDNet article

Undercover NBC Dateline reporter bolts from DEFCON 2007 by ZDNet‘s George Ou — Undercover reporter Michelle Madigan (Associate Producer of NBC Dateline) got a little more than she bargained for when she tried to sneak in to DEFCON 2007 with hidden cameras to get someone to confess to a felony. When DEFCON staff announced the “spot the undercover reporter” game and told the audience that an undercover reporter […]

some enterprising korean had the nerve to sell my idea and turn it into a performance art piece

[The Pillowig Project Page via Neatorama]

Apple Inc’s WWDC 2007 brought us a beta version of the Safari web browser. Thanks to the speed and size of the Internet, we have a lot of people already spitting on it and talking behind its back as it tries to earn the respect of beta testers.

– There are the Mac users who don’t currently use Safari. They stand by the principal that Firefox is superior but cannot stop the innate sense of the new and novel. I liken it to savvy Windows users who opt not to use their OS’ preferred browser, but who is to say that any browser is better because based solely on style choice.

– Windows users who aren’t Apple bashers. They test Safari and ask why there’s another browser in the crowded web browser space.

– Windows users who are Apple bashers, look for ways to game the browser and point out security flaws; firmly placing Safari next to the iTunes and Mac OS X on the “I hate you Apple” shelf they have over the fireplace that was featured in Microsoft Bob.

What I’m truly afraid of is that everyone is right, and this is going to flop. Apple is banking on Safari to be the portal in which we enter into the future of computing. Since so many traditional applications are becoming not just web-enabled but web-based, they see this as essential that there be a unifying platform, not just for us mac users, but for anyone. Providing Safari and the webkit, Apple is telling the developers out there that there’s no excuse to make the Internet that much more compliant.

But, is it Apple’s responsibility to shepherd us through Web 2.0? Who is to say that they are the right way to go? Firefox has the support of the app-developing community, but you don’t see it on every device. Opera is on every OS and on many devices, including Window’s Mobile but lacks popularity amongst the masses. IE works on Windows and Windows Mobile and not much else. Sure Safari will work on Windows, Mac OS, and the iPhone, but people still have to roll their own apps for Linux, the S60, and platforma-obscura. Will the Web 2.0 community embrace a large, traditional company who won the hearts of the masses with pseudo-internet products like the iPod and iMac?

Will the community wake up and draw parallels between
Microsoft -> IE -> Windows Mobile
Apple -> Safari -> OS X on iPhone?