DailyTech

» see dailytech.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

DailyTech started on 1 January 2005. Kristopher Kubicki had been an editor at AnandTech and left on good terms to build the thing AnandTech could not be. The parent site had signed non-disclosure agreements with the hardware industry and was bound by them. The new one would sign nothing, and would therefore be free to publish what its writers were told in confidence by people who had not read the fine print.

It worked for about a decade. The comment section was openly modeled on Slashdot, with readers moderating each other underneath every story, and the revenue was advertising plus syndication of the news feed to other sites. The house specialty was the roadmap: processors and graphics cards a generation out, named and dated in public while the vendors were still briefing them under embargo.

In early December 2015 the site stopped updating with no notice of any kind, and then it came back in 2016. The second stop came in December 2017 and nobody announced that one either. The final post is time-stamped 6 December 2017, 6:55 in the morning.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the no-nda bargain ~

A standing instruction not to sign anything is a real editorial position with a real cost. It buys you every leak from everyone who is angry at a vendor, and it costs you the review samples and the seat at the launch. DailyTech took that trade on purpose and spent years printing specifications that Intel and NVIDIA had not confirmed.

For readers outside the United States the leak was worth more than the review, because the review arrived with the product and the leak arrived months early, while you were still planning. Turkish hardware forums of that era ran on this kind of material. People built their forum signatures out of a parts list and argued about a socket nobody could buy yet, and the raw material came from sites that had nothing to lose by printing it.

~ seven of thirty-five ~

On 5 June 2007 DailyTech published something riskier than a roadmap. It polled thirty-five technology news and review sites about advertising-for-content arrangements and reported that seven of them accepted some version of the trade. Naming the practice at all was unusual in 2007. The result went out under its own masthead.

Kubicki also ran public feuds with the writing at Tom's Hardware and at several other outlets. The editorial personality of the site was argumentative in a register that dates it badly now and was the entire appeal then, when a tech news site with an opinion about other tech news sites was still a novelty.

Which makes the last two years of the archive strange to read. The leaks stop. So do the arguments. What is left on the homepage in its final capture is a wall of short product write-ups, most of them under a single byline, several of them about Black Friday.

~ cyber monday 2017 ~

The last version of dailytech.com the Internet Archive holds was captured on 21 January 2018, and every item on it is from November or December 2017. There is a Harman Kardon speaker and a 65 inch television described as a great Black Friday score. One of the last posts is headed Cyber Monday 2017, Do's and Don'ts. At the foot of the page the copyright had already rolled over to 2018, beside a link labeled Ethics and the name Kristopher Kubicki. After that capture the crawler found nothing there again, and the domain has had no address at all for years. A site that spent nearly thirteen years publishing what other people wanted kept quiet got no notice of its own.

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