Think Secret

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

~ the obituary ~

apple rumor sites were a genre i read about rather than read. in 2005 i was at university on a windows machine, and an apple product in turkey was a thing you saw priced in a magazine rather than a thing anybody in the room owned. think secret still reached me the way it reached most people outside that world, sideways, as a news story about a company suing a teenager.

the teenager was nicholas ciarelli, born in september 1986, who started the site in 1999 at thirteen and wrote it for the next six years under the pen name nick deplume. wikipedia's article on the site gives 1998 while its article on him gives 1999 at thirteen. the earliest archived copy of thinksecret.com is from october 1999 and the arithmetic on his birthday agrees with it, so 1999 is what this grave uses.

what he had was sources inside apple and inside the supply chain feeding it, plus a habit of publishing specifics instead of atmosphere. the site did not run rendered mockups of what a product might look like. it ran names and prices with dates attached, which is what made it dangerous rather than merely annoying.

~ the case file ~

~ what a thirteen year old had ~

the pen name held for five years. nick deplume was a joke on nom de plume that nobody seems to have unpicked at the time, and behind it was a middle schooler in massachusetts running a publication that professional reporters cited. by the time apple filed, he was a harvard undergraduate writing for the harvard crimson, and on 10 january 2005 a blogger put the two names together in public.

the operation itself was small in the way those sites were: a wordmark, a column of dated posts, a tip address, and whatever credibility the last twelve months of accuracy had bought. accuracy was the entire asset. a rumor site that is wrong twice is a fan blog, and think secret was very rarely wrong.

~ the mac mini ~

in december 2004 it published details of a cheap headless macintosh aimed at the sub five hundred dollar market and a word processing application to go with it. on 11 january 2005 steve jobs walked onto the macworld stage and announced the mac mini and iwork. the scoop had landed about a month early and was correct on the substance.

apple sued that january, before the products were even announced, claiming the reports violated trade secret law and asking the court to make him identify who had talked. the suit is what turned a rumor site into a press freedom story. the questions in it were the ones the web had been avoiding since it started publishing: whether somebody without a newsroom counts as a journalist, and whether a shield law written for newspapers covers a kid with a domain name.

~ the other case ~

apple was fighting a second front at the same time, over a leaked audio interface codenamed asteroid, with subpoenas aimed at appleinsider and powerpage. that one produced an actual ruling. on 26 may 2006 the california court of appeal quashed the subpoenas and held that online publishers were covered by the state's reporter's shield law and by the constitutional privilege against naming confidential sources.

think secret's own case never got that far, so the precedent that protects online reporting today came out of the case apple lost rather than the one it ended by agreement. the ruling did not save the site. it only made the site's closure a choice rather than a verdict.

~ the settlement ~

on 20 december 2007 the two sides announced a settlement whose terms were confidential except for the two facts everybody needed. no sources were revealed, and think secret would no longer be published. ciarelli said he was pleased to have reached an amicable settlement and could now move on with his college studies and his broader journalistic work, which is the sentence you write when the lawyers have approved it.

the site kept serving for another eight weeks. the archive has a full nine thousand two hundred byte front page on 13 february 2008 and then nothing until july, when the address returns a six hundred and eighty one byte page, and from november it is a wall. the notice reading that the publication think secret is no longer in operation went up on 14 february, the day after the last real capture.

ciarelli went on to write for the daily beast and in 2012 co-founded bookbub, which recommends discounted ebooks and has nothing to do with any of this. three years of litigation ended with a publication closed and nobody outside apple any wiser about who had talked. depending on where you stand that is either a source protected or a very expensive way to keep a secret.

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