It's not a secret, they've never said that it changed.
Also, I do a lot of work for SEO/Affiliates. The exact same tech with pretty much the same content ranks top 2 for highly competitive keywords when hosted on a very high PR domain, and top 100-1000 when hosted on a normal, on-topic domain. This is consistent over multiple content areas, and it's why the large media companies have begun to sell/rent folders/subdomains on their site. Instant ranking (until somebody else buys access to a larger media company), no risk, as Google doesn't consider "paid publishing" as against their guidelines.
