Opaque Lucidity

Lockergnome's Buddies

Most of you don't know Chris Pirillo. Those of you who do know him as the person behind Gnomedex and and as perhaps the biggest shill for Microsoft to disguise himself as a non-biased tech dude. When Windows Vista Beta 2 was released for public testing, Pirillo set up a BitTorrent seed (feed?) so that those who were locked out of the MS site due to bandwidth could still get the download.

This is something that MS should have done in the first place and I honestly believe that Pirillo acted in good faith. Microsoft, however, doesn't like people distributing even its free products without their consent, so they sent Pirillo a cease-and-desist letter from their army of greasy barristers. Pirillo took everything down as requested, since Microsoft is one of the sponsors of his Gnomedex convention (which, I'm told, is a very big deal).

Right after one of Pirillo's presentations, two guys from MS presented Pirillo a framed copy of the cease-and-desist letter, sort of a "no hard feelings" things designed to make everybody laugh and to show that even the boys in Redmond have a sense of humor. Pirillo, still yearning for acceptance, took it all in stride.

You're probably wondering why I've written so much about this. The truth is that I despise media stunts like this, especially involving the likes of MS and Pirillo. If the perp had been some nobody from Indiana, Microsoft would've squashed him like a bug. But because it was Chris Pirillo, we are all supposed to laugh it off as no big deal.

Asshats.