Anyone wondering about the perils of an always-on, know-everything digital world can look no further than the premature publication of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ obituary by venerable newswire, Bloomberg. Whoops!

The opening lead:

“Steve Jobs, who helped make personal computers as easy to use as telephones, changed the way animated films are made, persuaded consumers to tune into digital music and refashioned the mobile phone, has XXXX. He was TK. Jobs XXXX, TK said XXXXX.

“A college dropout who co-founded Apple Inc., Jobs won ardent supporters by ushering “cool” gadgets to market. He delivered the Macintosh, the first user-friendly computer, and conquered the online music industry with the iPod, making white ear buds fashionable. In 2007, he led Apple into the mobile-phone market with the Web-surfing iPhone. And as chief executive officer of Pixar animation studios, Jobs promoted computer-generated storytelling with movies including ‘Toy Story’.”

It’s no secret reporters “pre-bake” a lot of their stories. How else do sportswriters churn out such lurid accounts of the games they cover up against razor-thin deadlines? The question is how did this end up on the wire.

“A Bloomberg spokeswoman said: ‘This was a routine update of a biography by the obits department, meant for the internal system and not meant for publication. ‘It was momentarily posted on the external wire, in error, and immediately deleted.’”

When I was a wire reporter for Dow Jones and Reuters almost 10 years ago, there were (and no doubt even more so now) very complex procedures for sending news to the wire. At DJN, one had to place a comma precisely in the right location on your screen and hit the F11 key on your keyboard. I did once accidentally publish an inchoate piece, replete with notes and slang, on a biotechnology company, after carelessly hitting the F11 key. Luckily, the stock held steady. Reuters, at the time a British-owned agency, had much more formal and hierarchical procedures. There were rarely any snafus.

These days, anyone can find out anything, almost anytime and send it to anyone wherever they are and whenever they want it. A little obituary controversy never hurt anyone, but imagine what might have transpired if Bloomberg had accidentally published a piece on a $10 surge in crude, or, worse, ventured near the powder key of Georgia.

Mark Twain once wrote that you should never go to war with someone who has ink by the barrel. Maybe, were he alive today, he could have said that anyone with ink by the barrel could start a war.