Getting the kind of information about Steve Jobs' health that Apple's (AAPL) investors and customers deserve is tricky, as tech reporters discovered to their peril this week.

The sources in the best position to talk about Jobs' medical condition — which forced him to announce Wednesday that he taking a six-month medical leave — are his physicians, and they're prevented by doctor-patient confidentiality from disclosing what they know.

Everybody else is either speculating, spinning or being spun.

Even Jobs' own statements are suspect. He has issued two e-mail medical dispatches in the past two weeks that are not only vague and lacking in hard medical information, but contradictory — moving in the space of 10 days from a confirmed "simple and straightforward" remedy to health issues that are "more complex" than originally thought.

The best piece of reporting on the Jobs' health problems is still Peter Elkind's March 2008 cover story in Fortune "The Trouble with Steve Jobs." It was Elkind who first reported that Jobs delayed treatment for his pancreatic cancer for nine months while he pursued alternative medicine approaches. And it was Elkind who identified the type of surgery Jobs underwent in August 2004 — a particularly brutal and complex operation called the Whipple procedure — opening the door for other reporters to fill in the blanks. (See here.)

It's been downhill from there. One low point was the interview Jobs gave Joe Nocera of the New York Times last July in which he called the Times columnist (and former Fortune editor) a "slime bucket" before going off the record to reveal that his health problems went well beyond the "common bug" an Apple spokeswoman had offered as the reason for Jobs' sudden weight loss last June. (See here.)

Nocera kept Jobs' remarks out of his piece, but he did report what he and his colleague, John Markoff, had learned independently — that Jobs had told associates that he had a second operation earlier in the year to correct ongoing digestive problems, but that his cancer had not returned. (UPDATE: Nocera posted a new piece today on the Times blog, calling for Apple to come clean.)

This would not be the first time that the mainstream press reported — secondhand, from unnamed sources — that Jobs is cancer-free. Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal did it Thursday, the Times citing two sources "familiar with his medical condition," the Journal just one.

Note that no one at Apple has ever directly addressed the issue of recurrence. The closest anyone came was the e-mail Jobs sent to his staff in Aug. 2004 informing them that his operation was successful and that he was "cured." None of Jobs' subsequent statements have said anything about cancer, one way or the other.

Jobs' most recent e-mail set off the usual flood of journalistic second guessing (see Techmeme here). The most painful was CNBC correspondent Jim Goldman's TechCheck column Wednesday.

Goldman had gone out on a limb three weeks earlier, citing "sources inside the company" who assured him that Jobs' surprise decision to skip Macworld had nothing to do with his health. On Wednesday, he took it all back, calling the latest twist in Jobs' story "tantamount to fiduciary, ethical and financial whiplash."

Goldman went on to say that he has known since late last week that there was something wrong with Jobs — based on interviews with two "well known [but unnamed] tech industry executives … very close to Jobs."

"One said, based on his contact with Jobs personally, that he was in 'serious denial' about just how bad the circumstances had become. The other explained to me that he was 'deeply concerned' about Jobs, and the sudden lack of communication, the non-return of emails, ignoring chat requests, unreturned phone calls was a strong indication to him that Jobs was in 'dire' shape." (link)

This was quite a turnaround, and it led to perhaps the most embarrassing moment in the whole affair: a live segment on CNBC Wednesday afternoon in which Newsweek's Dan Lyons (a.k.a Fake Steve Jobs) confronted Goldman and accused him of "sucking up" to Apple to get access to the company and, as a result, getting "played and punked." The five-minute segment is the equivalent of a journalistic car wreck — you can't stop watching it — and has reportedly resulted in Lyons getting banned from CNBC for life (a report that a CNBC spokesman has since denied, although nobody has called Lyons to clear things up).

We've pasted the clip — in its entirety — below the fold.

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Last we checked, the full catalog of Beatles songs was supposed to be available for sale on the iTunes Store before the end of 2008.

Well, it's not happening this year, according to one of the band's two surviving members, and for all we know it may never happen.

"The last word I got back was it's stalled at the whole moment, the whole process," Paul McCartney told reporters gathered Monday for the media launch of his latest album, Electric Arguments. (link)

Where's Fake Steve Jobs when we need him?

Nobody was better at cutting through the posturing, lawyering and stonewalling by Apple Inc. (AAPL), the Beatles' Apple Corps and EMI that have kept the world's best-selling musical act off the world's largest digital music store lo these many years. (EMI owns the rights to Beatles recordings, but must get permission from Apple Corps to release them in new formats.)

A year ago, McCartney told Billboard.com that the deal was all but signed. "The whole thing is primed, ready to go — there’s just maybe one little sticking point left, and I think it’s being cleared up as we speak, so it shouldn’t be too long. It’s down to fine-tuning.” (link)

"Let me put that statement into American English," Dan Lyons (a.k.a. Fake Steve Jobs) wrote at the time. "Paul wants more money." (link)

Now, a year later, the sticking points seem to have multiplied.

At Monday's press conference, Sir Paul was asked once again when the Beatles were coming to iTunes. Here, according to Billboard.biz, was his full reply:

"That is constantly being talked of, we'd like to do it," said McCartney. "What happens is, when something's as big as The Beatles, it's heavy negotiations.

"We are very for it, we've been pushing it. But there are a couple of sticking points, I understand. So the last word I got back was that it had stalled, the whole process.

"They [EMI] want something we're not prepared to give them. Hey, sounds like the music business.

"It's between EMI and The Beatles. What else is new." (link)

EMI, in response, issued this statement:

"We have been working hard to secure agreement with Apple Corps. to make the Beatles' legendary recording catalog available to fans in digital form. Unfortunately the various parties involved have been unable to reach agreement but we really hope everyone can make progress soon." (link)

Translation: Paul wants more money.

Or maybe Yoko Ono is the problem. One of the classic entries in the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs — before Lyons gave it up to write full-time for Newsweek (and before Newsweek finally muzzled the Real Dan Lyons) — was the scene in which he imagined Jobs and Yoko trying to thrash out an agreement in John Lennon's old apartment in Manhattan. (The deal falls apart on Yoko's insistence that the band be billed as  "John Lennon and the Beatles" with Yoko listed as the fifth Beatle.) (link)

The irony is that the parties involved have dragged their heels for so long that much of the deal's original value may have evaporated. Most everyone who cares about the Beatles has already filled their iPods with songs ripped from the CDs. Meanwhile, as Peter Kafka reports on All Things Digital, the boom in digital music sales seems to be slowing, which could make even the digital Beatles harder to sell. (link)

If Sir Paul is really waiting for a better offer, he — and the Beatles fans — could be waiting for a very long time.

[Photo: The Beatles' Feb. 7, 1964 New York press conference, courtesy of Apple Corps.]

Dan Lyons the former Forbes editor whose brilliant Web parodies of Apple's CEO entertained tech enthusiasts for two years, publicly apologized Friday to those who complain that he's not funny since he stopped writing as his alter ego, the Fake Steve Jobs.

"I really miss him," said Lyons, speaking in New York City at the Web 2.0 Expo, a tech conference sponsored by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Lyons stopped contributing to his popular blog, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, in July. He now writes a column for Newsweek and a blog called Real Dan.

According to Lyons, neither has been particularly well-received.

"I get these e-mails all the time: 'I don't understand how Fake Steve can be so good and you can be so bad. Your blog sucks, dude.'"

"I apologize," Lyons told the audience. "I really am much less interesting than Fake Steve as a writer."

Lyons says he had intended to bring The Secret Diary to Newsweek, but lost heart after Apple's (AAPL) World Wide Developers Conference in June, when it was apparent to all who saw him that the real Steve Jobs had lost a lot of weight. (Jobs had a malignant tumor removed from his pancreas in 2004 and has been having lingering digestive difficulties as a result of the surgery, according to friends. See here.)

"I woke up one morning and I kind of lost heart," said Lyons. "I said man, I just can't keep doing this joke."

But Lyons was heartened by Jobs' appearance at Apple's "Let's Rock" event earlier this month. "He's looking better now. Maybe we'll revive it."

A few bits of Apple (AAPL) news worth noting:

Paul McCartney: "It's all happening soon," he told Billboard.com. "Most of us are all sort of ready. The whole thing is primed, ready to go — there's just maybe one little sticking point left, and I think it's being cleared up as we speak, so it shouldn't be too long. It's down to fine-tuning. I'm pretty sure it'll be happening next year, 2008." (link)

"Let me put that statement into American English," says Fake Steve Jobs. "Paul wants more money."

First Leopard Update: More than a dozen improvements in Mac OS X 10.5.1, issued three weeks after Leopard's release, including fixes in Mail, Airport, Time Machine, Back to My Mac and some pesky Firewall issues. Not yet repaired: Among the repairs: that nasty core data bug.

iMac Anti-freeze: Apple also released a graphics firmware update that's supposed to finally solve the freezing problem some aluminum iMac users have been suffering since September. I'll believe it when my Dad tells me his iMac has gone more than a week without crashing.

Three New Mac Ads: The Get-a-Mac ads are back on TV (and available from Apple here) after a summer hiatus. "Same joke," writes Michael Gartenberg. "Still as effective." But maybe not quite as funny.

For a simple comedy sketch, the Saturday Night Live takeoff on the new "black backdrop" Apple (AAPL) iPhone ads carries an awful lot of corporate baggage.

The bit aired Nov. 3 and the video was posted the next day on YouTube — and enthusiastically linked to by TechCrunch.

It's funny enough, with a clever set-up for the "pinch it" gesture. But by Sunday afternoon, NBC Universal (GE) had scrubbed the free version off YouTube, a site that many broadcasters see as a threat to their business model.

If you want to see the SNL sketch today, you either have to go to hulu.com, NBC and News Corp.'s (NWS) invitation-only (while in beta) answer to Apple's iTunes Music Store, or visit the official SNL page on NBC's corporate site. Either way, you must sit through a 15-second TV-style commercial before you get to the clip — a chilling vision of what the Internet would look like if it had been invented by the folks who run broadcast television.

If that weren't enough, the SNL team — inadvertently or not — added what Gizmodo and Cult of Mac see as one more dig at Steve Jobs, with whom NBC has been feuding these many month. If you look closely, you'll notice that the iPhone used in the sketch has a little blue Installer icon on its face, a sure sign that the device was "jailbroken," or hacked, to add unauthorized programs — despite Apple's admonitions to the contrary.

NBC, of course, has bigger things to worry about right now. The Writers Guild called a strike at midnight and promised to set up picket lines in front of 30 Rock this morning, which means that unless the suits plan to write the sketches, SNL will be in reruns for the duration.

For Fake Steve Jobs' screed on the absurdity of the Hollywood labor situation, see his Secret Diary here.

Next week, Daniel Lyons, a.k.a. the Fake Steve Jobs, steps out of character to start a three-city book tour to promote Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (A Parody) [Da Capo Press; $22.95]. That means hard-copy versions of the book — galleys of which have been floating around reviewers' offices for more than a month — will start to arrive in bookstores, where loyal readers of FSJ's website can see for themselves how the fake Apple (AAPL) CEO's online persona translates into print.

The good news is that this is not just a compilation of FSJ's online posts, although some of his best set pieces — including Hillary Clinton shaking down the Silicon Valley VCs for campaign cash and Yoko Ono insisting that iTunes list the band as "John Lennon and the Beatles" — appear in the book more or less intact. This is, by and large, an original work of fiction, with lots of new material and something resembling a plot — with a beginning, middle and end.

The bad news — which struck this reader at about page 31 — is that this is not really a novel either, with three-dimensional characters who live in a fully-realized fictional world. It was on page 31 — when Jobs, devastated by the possibility that the options backdating scandal might cost him control of his company, goes home, smokes some pot, and calls his house manager at her boyfriend's house to come over and make him a mango smoothie — that it occurred to me that the real Steve Jobs doesn't live alone. He lives in a real house with a real wife and real children. And he probably doesn't have the luxury of getting stoned, dropping acid, running off to San Francisco with his friend Larry Ellison to shoot paintball guns at the homeless, or any of the other reckless things FSJ does on a whim in this book.

For whatever reason — perhaps the pressure of writing a novel on deadline on top of his regular online posts and his day job as an editor at Forbes — the challenge of bringing Fake Steve Jobs convincingly to life was too much for Lyons. Instead we get what is in effect a 248-page blog entry populated by paper-thin characters who just aren't that funny. It's a lesson in how literary tricks that made for truly brilliant short-form writing can grow lame when played again and again at book length

The novel also suffers from the timidness of Da Capo Press and its libel lawyers, who have shorn Lyons of one of the features that made his blog must-reading among Silicon Valley insiders: his willingness to skewer real computer industry executives, from Microsoft's Bill ("the Beastmaster") Gates to Sun's Jonathan ("My Little Pony") Schwartz, without pulling any punches. With the exception of Ellison, almost all the identities in Options have been fudged, turning what might have been a razor sharp parody into a coy roman a clef.

It's been a tough few months for Danny Lyons, between his outing by the New York Times and the rush to get this book out on schedule. The best part is that none of it seems to have slowed his online output — or his willingness to call 'em like he sees 'em. His Sept. 3 rant against the TV Networks is as good as anything he's written to date — and as smart a critique of the broadcast industry as you're likely to read anywhere.