Here we go, folks-- it's time for another new AtAT episode! Yeah! Woooo! So buckle up and get ready for your daily dose of sarcasm, melodrama, and overdone references to Reality Distortion Fields! Also, some childish insults and tired jabs at Steve Ballmer. Plus decent spelling and made-up words galore. And as always, some sort of... satire kinda thing. About...

...Um...

Okay, well, we'll level with you: tomorrow's Thanksgiving and the start of a four-day weekend, so mentally speaking, we've already totally checked out. Yeah. So maybe we should just bail on the usual format and go around the table, and we can all say what we're thankful for. Ready? We'll start: we're thankful for Exposé, Trader Joe's frozen burritos, TiVo, AirPort, TiVo with AirPort, our USB Christmas tree, Elmo's World, and brown paper packages tied up with string. There are probably others, too, like not being hospitalized with flesh-eating bacteria, but those cover the big ones.

Okay, your turn. Go.

...Hello?...

Oh, right-- this is sort of a one-way deal, here. Nurtz. Hmmm, well, okay, we'll forget the going-around-the-table idea and settle for hearing from faithful viewer Brian Warren, who sent in his thanks list ahead of time. (We suppose we're also thankful for faithful viewers who send in filler that lets us coast through a pre-holiday episode-- it probably ranks up there somewhere between TiVo and the we-don't-have-bacteria thing.) Brian is thankful for Mac OS X's "password hint" feature and his own sparkling ingenuity, without both of which he'd still be out a 17-inch PowerBook right now.

Get this: while traveling in Vancouver last month (that's in Canada, eh), Brian fell victim to thievery most foul. The culprit made off with his wallet, his camera, and-- most upsettingly of all-- his PowerBook. Oh, and his iPod, which, ironically enough, contained a backup of the important data on his PowerBook. Brian filed a report with the Vancouver police, knowing full well that only about 3% of stolen computers ever get returned to their owners, and flew home, PowerBookless and dejected.

Oh, stop bawling. It gets better. See, it turns out that the guy who wound up with the loot was a meth-head, and a crappy driver to boot. So when the cops pulled him over and spotted a suspiciously expensive 17-inch PowerBook in the back seat, said meth-head told them that "somebody" had sold it to him for a hundred bucks. Naturally, Vancouver's finest confiscated the 'Book (and the iPod along with it) and started poking around on it to find some information. What they found was the Mac OS X login screen-- and after three random incorrect guesses at a password (we expect they tried "canucksrule," "lornemichaels," and "degrassi"), the login window showed Brian's password hint-- which was "$$ for return of computer. Call 907.766.2970."

And so, a week after his ordeal north of the border, Brian received a phone call from Greg down at the Vancouver police station, and today he has his mammoth aluminum baby back safe in his arms. (His iPod, too, which the none-too-tech-savvy police had described as "something that looks like a mouse but isn't a mouse.") As it turns out, the police had totally lost Brian's theft report; there was no record of it anywhere. So if he hadn't thought to include that little note as his password hint, he'd still be mourning the loss of his Mac even as some Canadian cops continued to guess random passwords before giving up and using it as a snazzy clipboard. All's well that ends well, especially since Brian didn't just get his PowerBook back-- he got it back with new music added to iTunes, free porn in his iPhoto library, and even a bunch of custom icons Mr. Meth had set before he shut down the system and effectively locked himself out. What more could you possibly ask for?

(Snif) Kinda makes you cry, doesn't it?

Oh, but there's just so much to be thankful for! Take, for example, Mac rumors with the persistence and dogged tenacity of a brain-starved zombie hobbling futilely after an amused and oh-so-wheeled Stephen Hawking as he motors away with a twinkle in his eye. You know the ones: "Disney buying Apple" is a perennial favorite. So is "Newton II/Return of Newton/Apple PDA." "Mac OS X boxed for Intel hardware" has risen from the dead so many times it's got George Romero's home phone number on speed dial.

And then there's a relative newcomer to the field, but still a rumor with a sticktuitiveness that has already assumed legendary proportions: the Apple Tablet. To a certain degree this is an offshoot of the "Newton II" rumor; for years mysterious cloaked figures have whispered under cover of darkness about an imminent Apple-branded tablet device that would use a stylus for user input and would do... well, something, although that "something" changes every so often. At one point it was a wireless remote desktop for a full-fledged Mac. At another time it may have been an education-targeted unit like the old eMate. For a while some people were certain it would hover in mid-air and attack one's enemies on command with miniature death rays and exciting pointy bits.

We hadn't seen hide nor hair of the Apple Tablet rumor for a good long while now (save a "whatever happened to?..." Q&A over at Mac OS Rumors last week), but faithful viewer bo alerted us to the fact that, of all people, Robert X. Cringely has unearthed the beast once more over at PBS. Cringeley's take on the matter is that the only reason Apple hasn't shipped a tablet yet is because so far there's been no killer app to make it sell-- but he expects that to change "soon."

The killer app of which he speaks is wireless streaming of full-on HDTV video, and apparently the IEEE has been trying to settle on a standard for such a thing for a while, now. You know, of course, that 802.11b is the 11-Mbps wireless networking standard upon which Apple based its original AirPort, and 802.11g is the newer 54-Mbps standard at the heart of AirPort Extreme. Well, the IEEE is reportedly getting close to ratifying a standard called 802.15.3 (the creativity and descriptive power in the naming never ceases to astound us; why call it FireWire when you can opt for 1394?), which will be an "Ultra-Wide Band" wireless networking technology with a range of about thirty feet or so and enough bandwidth to pump "Everybody Loves Raymond" through the air without requiring the ownership of an inconveniently large local CBS affiliate.

According to Cringeley, "Quanta, the Taiwanese company that makes many Apple notebooks, has been apparently switching its production to the new tablets, or at least that has been reported in the Taipei press since early this year." He says that Apple may have a tablet on the market "as early as January," and envisions an 802.15.3-enabled device that will allow you to "watch TV in your bathroom, access your audio and video collection from anywhere in the house" (as long as your house is less than sixty feet across, we suppose), and "control your big screen TV and route video to it from your desktop or the Internet." Furthermore, you'll also be able to "take a dozen movies and your entire music collection with you on a trip," "strap the gizmo to the back of your car headrest and entertain the kids," and tons more. In short, Apple's tablet will be the ultimate realization of the Digital Hub concept.

And there it is: the Apple Tablet rumor reborn. Believe it or don't; January's not that far away, and we'll know if Cringeley's smoking crack-ley soon enough. In the meantime, please excuse us-- we have a call to make...

"...Hi, Mr. Romero? We've got a movie idea we'd like to pitch to you..."

Feeling left out because those Windows users seem to get all the good security holes? Sure, Apple issues "Security Updates" every once in a while, but really, when was the last time a Mac security flaw led to global disruption and billions of dollars' worth of lost productivity? Exactly. We Mac users sort of get the short end of the stick in this whole deal.

Well, it may not be the Blaster worm or anything, but faithful viewer William Carrel still gives us something we can give thanks for: he's publicized a "new" Mac OS X security hole over at Carrel.org which is slightly more exciting than the ones we typically see: apparently a "malicious DHCP response can grant root access" to clever evildoers, which, as you probably know, means that they could do pretty much anything to your Mac that they want, short of painting it red with a cool flame on the side. (More's the pity-- wouldn't that look bitchin'?)

Most of the lame Mac OS X security flaws we hear about aren't so serious as to allow root access to a Mac, especially without requiring physical access to the keyboard, so this latest advisory is already more exciting than usual. But get this: on top of potentially handing the Bad Guys the proverbial keys to the castle (as new Windows flaws do four or five times a month), this DHCP hole is reportedly present and wide open with default settings under Panther and Jaguar (both regular and Server versions), and probably earlier versions of Mac OS X as well. It's not quite Microsoftian in scale, but it's getting closer. Hooray for progress!

For what it's worth, exploiting the hole requires the Black Hats to run a DHCP server on a network reachable by your Mac, so this is apparently mostly an issue for people with AirPort cards or connected to large local networks. We're sure a fix from Apple is coming (although William waited 48 days after telling Apple about the hole before finally spreading the word himself), but in the meantime read the advisory for several workarounds that can protect you. They take literally about twenty seconds and maybe fifteen mouse clicks to perform. And just be thankful there isn't even any typing involved, lazybones.