Our readers will be happy to know that jailbreaks have returned to official iTunes Store content in the United States. Of course, we don’t mean you’ll be able to jailbreak your phone through any sort of App Store purchase; Apple has just stopped censoring the term in their US filtering system some time earlier this afternoon. While there’s no telling how long Apple was needlessly censoring “jailbreak’ out of its music and ringtone search results, the iTunes Store quickly uncensored the term (likely in reaction to the response from news sites and tech blogs).

"I guess Apple follows twitter and saw how silly that iTunes policy was...it's fixed now for songs and ringtones :) " MuscleNerd

If this was part of a scheme to keep Apple customers from buying apps outside of iTunes, it ultimately failed. The story was covered even by non-homebrew focused tech sites and mainstream news outlets like Gizmodo, Ars Technica, and The Huffington Post. (Amusingly, the Huffpo article refers to MuscleNerd as a “self-proclaimed” iPhone hacker, which would be like calling me a self-proclaimed blogger.)

The question still remains: how long has Apple been censoring the word jailbreak? A link provided on Twitter suggests the censored Thin Lizzy album title was discussed as early as September 2008, a little less than a year after the original JailbreakMe tool was released, and two months after the release of Apple’s official App Store. That’s right, the jailbreak community has been around for almost a year before there were official apps. (Labyrinth was mindblowing then.)

If the censorship was really this old, how come nobody cared until now? Do Thin Lizzy fans not use iTunes? Let us know what you think in the comments thread below.