Ignore them, really
Some of my Mac colleagues have been having a field day with some of the tin foil hat jibbering lunatic dumbassery that has been bouncing around the intartubes for the last couple of days regarding Nick Ciarelli/Think Secret's settlement with Apple over a lawsuit Apple filed back in 2005.
The long and short of it is that Apple took this guy -- a college kid (albeit, a *Harvard* undergrad) to court to make him tell them who tipped him off to a secret Apple product plan. And Apple ultimately failed. The courts turned down their request, made them pay legal fees, and ultimately, after dragging it out a couple of years, Apple and Nick's lawyer (a fellow from the excellent if sometimes misguided EFF) found an amicable settlement.
On one end of the extreme we have people declaring it a clear victory for bloggers, for the First Amendment, hallelujah. That Apple is a corporate menace akin to Microsoft in its evil ways, and that it shall be punished, and that this was just the first shot across the bow.
On the other extreme we have people saying that Ciarelli clearly suborned people to violate NDAs, and that he should be punished for being a corporate snoop.
Personally, I don't give a shit. I was delighted to post the news that Ciarelli and Apple had settled, for one reason and one reason only: I'm fucking sick and tired of reading (and writing) about it, and want to put it behind me once and for all.
And at the end of the day, I subscribe to Occam's Razor and figure the simplest explanation is the right one, and that's probably how Ciarelli felt too.