Health alert! AtAT's secret research lab staffed by hyperintelligent chimps (well, okay, AtAT's formerly secret research lab staffed by hyperintelligent chimps) has isolated a rare psychic virus that's "in the wild" and poised for a real outbreak. As far as we can make out, once infected with this new class of virus, subjects become incapable of properly attributing Apple's products and intellectual property to Apple itself-- at least, that's what we gather from the chimps' report; hyperintelligent they may be, but they desperately need penmanship lessons.

Reportedly this bizarre virus (currently dubbed "Virus X") infects entire informational sources in a gestalt fashion, rather than individual people in the group, at least if the symptoms present in Patient Zero are at all indicative. And who is Patient Zero, you ask? Brace yourselves: it's none other than the New York Times. You may recall that just couple of days ago, the Times erroneously attributed the advertising slogan "Think different" to Microsoft instead of Apple in a story about a basketball game. Well, thanks to the eagle eyes of faithful viewer Scott McNulty, the chimps now have a new data point to ponder: earlier today, David Pogue's Times article on small-footprint, big-feature laptops featured a photo of what is unmistakably an iBook-- but its caption identified the system as a "Fujitsu LifeBook S-4546." (The caption has since been corrected, but the chimps documented the error with a screenshot for research purposes.)

Now, just to make absolutely sure that Fujitsu doesn't happen to make an all-white laptop with seven uncovered ports along its left side, a nifty reclining display hinge, and the word "iBook" printed just below the screen, we found Fujitsu's LifeBook S Series page. The photo there is taken from roughly the same angle as the iBook picture, so a quick glance is enough to determine that anyone who mistakes a LifeBook for an iBook is very likely suffering from some sort of illness-- or at least a severe lack of attention to detail. Based on this data, the chimps are convinced that the Times is host to Virus X, and that it's only a matter of time before other media outlets are infected.

Unfortunately, at this time we are unaware of how Virus X spreads, though its unique nature implies that its transport medium is nothing as mundane as air or bodily fluids. Since it's some entirely new breed of psychic bug that infects a gestalt consciousness, for all we know it can replicate itself into a new host organization when a single member of said organization reads an article containing virus-incurred Apple-themed misinformation-- though of course that seems extremely unlikely. Still, we encourage all members of media outlets to exercise caution when exposing themselves to New York Times content, and in fact we here at AtAT are already filtering out all Times web pages so infected content can't reach us via our Gateway iMac or Toshiba PowerBook.