Under Public Pressure, Sitening to Change Name to iTard

Ever since we tricked Fake Steve Jobs (FSJ) into revealing his obscure, but geographically revealing IP address, some high profile Apple enthusiast sites have taken the story to new heights and fluffy realities. Thanks in part to Radio Active Code Blog and his theory that FSJ is really Bostonian Andy Ihnatko, Mac fan-boys (and fan-men) have been pissed. So much so that we were referred to as "negative people" by Rex Hammock and iTard (my personal favorite) by Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle.

People are upset that anyone would try to unmask the fabled FSJ, even if the attempt, such as ours, was pathetic and really wouldn't provide any of the necessary information to reveal who FSJ is. Part of the exaggerated importance of this finding was fueled by FSJ himself. He was uncharacteristically reactionary after he found out what we did. He not only pulled the blog entry, he also changed his email address from a Yahoo! account (the source of the vulnerability) to a Gmail account! His behavior set off alarms that made many people think that someone was getting too close. Had he done nothing, the reaction probably would have been much more muted.

Something that FSJ should have been doing all along is using a proxy server. There are many free and paid proxy servers that will practically make any Internet usage anonymous (untraceable). Why he hasn't taken this very simple and prudent step to protect his identity, I don't know.

Who is FSJ? I don't know. Is it Andy Ihnatko? Maybe, maybe not. In fact, I'm surprised that nobody has even suggested that it could actually be a woman. That could be one of the greatest surprises of all!

Regardless, we never thought that releasing FSJ's IP address would be enough to unveil his (or her) real identity, and we still don't think it's enough. Otherwise, we would have never released it to the public. In fact, I would say that we really don't care all that much who FJS is. We enjoy the blog and his writing and we're looking forward to reading his new book, Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody.

In the meantime, we'll continue to enjoy all of the negative publicity and traffic to our site. After all, it's not every day you get to be called an iTard.