Today is a sad day. Plucky college kid Nick Ciarelli has agreed to close down his Apple rumor blog, Think Secret. Ciarelli has been publishing the site since he was 13, under the name Nick dePlume.
Apple filed a lawsuit in January 2005 to try and force Ciarelli to disclose his source inside the company for pre-announcement news. Think Secret disclosed the release of the Mac Mini and the iLife 05 software suite two weeks before Steve Jobs did on stage.
Today Ciarelli announced that an amiable resolution has been found and as part of his settlement he will shutter his blog. He will not disclose his source, thank goodness. He says he’s satisfied with the settlement; he may have got a chunk of money out of the settlement as well, but the fact remains that he had to go through years of legal struggles and is now closing his blog.
Apple’s incredible secrecy can only be expected to create a corresponding cadre of rumor blogs. It’s like a symbiotic relationship, with rumor blogs stoking the fires of anticipation and occaisionally getting some things right. What’s the big deal?
The whole thing is disgusting and makes this Apple customer all the less excited about future releases. Add this incredible bullying to my list of complaints – along with constant hardware problems and a desktop full of applications that can only be force-quit.
Some Context is Important
While the blogosphere is aflame with anger about this, and I think that’s appropriate, it is important to remember the bloggers in other parts of the world who have been treated far worse than Nick Ciarelli. While he played a very fun game of cat and mouse with the makers of some of the world’s most overpriced personal computers and has undoubtedly suffered terribly from the years of legal struggles, it certainly could have been worse.
Another college student named Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman is spending years in an Egyptian prison for blogging critically about Islam and the government he was born under. Another Egyptian, Wael Abbas, is presumably living his life on the run and had his YouTube account erased by Google after years of documenting government torture there.
Free speech and investigative journalism are of the utmost importance and none of these new media scribes deserve the treatment they are recieving. All of them, and many others, deserve our vehement support.
