The ongoing Apple - Think Secret legal wrangle is over, with the end result bringing about the demise of the notorious and sometimes uncannily accurate Think Secret rumor site perenially engaged in a running gun battle with the secretive Apple.

This agreement ends a two-year legal action by Apple to try to flush out Think Secret’s source of a leaked story about a Firewire-based input device for musical instruments that was never actually made. The confidential settlement resulted in Apple dropping the lawsuit and not pursuing the identity of the source, in exchange for the shutting down of the site.

Nick Ciarelli, publisher of Think Secret, said of the decision

I’m pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits.”

Ciarelli also told Engadget

I’ll just say that I’m very satisfied with the settlement, and that I’d like to thank the Electronic Frontier Foundation and my attorney, Terry Gross of Gross & Belsky, for their support.”

That’s how the beachball bounces.

Yesterday I came across something so tasteless and crude yet so brilliantly funny at the same time that it had me ROTFL that I can’t resist linking to it.

It’s a point by point comparison of the iPhone versus the Nokia E70 done in the most scandalous way possible. There are days when I want to do this kind of a review in my magazine, and to see something so gleefully done is such a purgative experience it seems cathartic.

You might have seen it before, but it’s new to me. It’s got foul language and rude pictures galore, so don’t show this to your boss or kids now.

Readers with delicate sensibilities can just not click.

In an earlier post, I asked why there weren’t more free and useful sites around like that screen test thing.

Ha! Apparently there are!

A friend of mine, Ryan, recently had to restore his iPhone and was worried about jailbreaking it again and putting in Installer.app and he texted for advice.

Well, gone are the good old days of circuitous and tedious hacking - today, for people like Ryan its just a matter of navigating to a website with your iPhone or your iPod Touch and clicking ok to installing AppSnapp for 1.1.1.

All you need do is go to

http://jailbreakme.com

Yes, it’s that easy, believe it or not.

All the instructions and cautions are there if you’re the fraidycat, but it’s just a matter of agreeing to the jailbreak and you’re on your way to the wide and wonderful and often weird world of third party apps. Coolness.

For the paranoid among us:

Those of you who’ve bit the bullet and sprung for an iPod Touch (or an iPhone) and are concerned about the screen issue that has come up (faulty rendering of blacks and all) but can’t tell if your new toy is one of the defective ones, or if you’re just worried about stuck or dead pixels like we all are, there is a free online test that you can use to detect any problems. (Would that there were more of these free and useful things around, huh?)

Just pop on over to AppleServedUp, and run the two sets of tests they offer for free.

The first tests for stuck or dead pixels, which the site accomplishes by playing a video file that runs through the gamut of colors full screen so that you can examine for offending dots. You’d be surprised at what you might discover.

The second batch for the Negative Black Problem runs you through a cycle of tests, the first showing you a boxed area with a slightly lighter shade of black over the darker background; if there is no discernible difference, you might have a problem. The second test is the Greyscale Gradient Test that shows you a couple of sets of gradients that might not be visible if you got a lemon. The third one is the Faulty Black Aura test which shows you the cover of Jay-Z’s The Black Album, which messes up if you got a crappy unit.

Try it out.

[Crossposted from Mobile Philippines]

Now that unlocking and jailbreaking are commonplace, some folk have come up with a gallery of all the different ways an iPhone might look like these days.

Check out the iPhone Screenshots pool of pics from Flickr.