Michael Tiemann

And a portrait of two total losers.

Get It Try It

Michael Tiemann is VP of open source affairs at Red Hat Linux as well as president of the Open Source Initiative. He used to be the chief technical officer of Red Hat. As of today he's a cheap attention whore.

Here he is pictured with the Elvis of FOSS.

How is Tiemann getting people's attention? Actually he has the basics of a good (but redundant) article on identity theft.

But today everybody's talking about the iPhone. A headline like 'before you get a credit check read this' isn't going to get any uniques. Changing the headline to 'Before You Activate your iPhone, Read This!' is going to get a lot.



So that's what Tiemann did. Or Charles Cooper did. Or one of those scurvies at CNET.

Again: the article per se isn't bad - although you'll be scratching your head trying to figure out exactly what it has to do with the iPhone.

The secret is it doesn't have anything to do with the iPhone. Only a lack of ethics on the part of Michael Tiemann and CNET.

Some things change and some things stay the same.