If you're leaking inside Apple info, you may want to duck and cover-- the Does are sprouting names. Earlier this month, when Apple filed suit against "John Doe 1" and claimed that "John Does 2 through 25" acted as accomplices, we were amused that the company was actually suing twenty-five people it couldn't identify. The plan became clear very quickly, though, as Apple used its newly-filed lawsuit to subpoena the records of Yahoo! in an attempt to learn the true identity of "John Doe 1," who had posted Apple trade secrets under the pseudonym "worker bee." By grabbing Yahoo!'s records, Apple hoped to identify the individual who had signed up for worker bee's Geocities accounts, at which point an amended lawsuit targeting a human being bearing an actual name would be just a global-search-and-replace away.

Well, according to faithful viewer David Schwartz, that time has come. He pointed out a CNET article which reports that Apple has just amended its lawsuit to name the secret identity of "John Doe 1." While CNET "chose not to publish the name because Apple would not confirm whether he is the only employee with that name," the important stuff to note here is that "worker bee" is an Apple employee (and therefore was bound by confidentiality agreements that he flagrantly violated), and that Apple apparently now knows exactly who the loose-lipped "resident of Santa Clara County" is. Which means that "worker bee," aka "John Doe 1," is officially neck-deep in stinky stuff and sinking fast.

As for the other twenty-four "John Does" out there, if any of you are tuned in and watching, it's worth noting that "Apple said it will continue to investigate whether others may have been involved." Given that John Doe 1 may opt to sing like a canary before he drowns in raw sewage, may we suggest that now might be a great time to explore the fascinating realm of witness protection-style identity modification? Some new papers printed up at the local Kinkos, a few quick whacks of the plastic surgeon's knife, and you're off to foreign lands unknown. What could be more glamorous?

Down here at the AtAT studios, we're big fans of Go2Mac and its predecessor, O'Grady's PowerPage. Over the years we've gotten a lot out of those sites, and also from commentary written by their proprietor, Jason O'Grady, and posted at MacWEEK and ZDNet. So as Steve's Seybold keynote draws nigh, we're keeping our fingers crossed that Go2Mac hasn't dug itself into another embarrassing situation as far as PowerBook predictions are concerned.

If you can stretch your brain way back to the beginning of this year, you might recall that the PowerPage posted a detailed list of Pismo specs a couple of days before the January Macworld Expo keynote, revealing "last minute" details on the new PowerBook that was fully expected to accompany Steve onstage. Jason had even gone so far as to say in a MacWEEK article in mid-December that "you can almost bank on the fact that Apple's Lombard replacement will take the stage during Jobs' keynote presentation Jan. 4." As you probably recall, Pismo was an utter no-show-- strike one.

Then, five weeks later, we were faced with Macworld Expo Tokyo and another looming Stevenote. While in some ways that event would be a natural setting in which to introduce the PowerBook that had been mysteriously absent at the San Francisco gig, there were two big reasons why lots of people thought it unlikely. First of all, Apple almost never released major new products at overseas events-- and secondly, Apple didn't even bother to schedule a webcast for the Tokyo keynote. Those clues led Jason to declare in a ZDNet article mere hours before Steve took the stage, "don't count on a new PowerBook or other major product announcements from the company. While some observers hold out hope that Jobs' presence at the world's biggest Mac show signals the imminent arrival of... Pismo, ...precedent suggests otherwise." And of course, what happened? Steve trotted out Pismo, refreshed iBooks, and speed-bumped Power Mac G4 systems. D'oh! Strike two.

So it's with a nervous constitution that we noticed an awful lot of surprisingly confident predictions at Go2Mac lately. Despite the fact that Apple has publicly stated that Steve's Seybold agenda won't include major new product releases, one Go2Mac article bucks the conventional wisdom and flatly states that we should "expect a new iBook [today] at Seybold SF," while a "beta release of a certain new Mac OS is almost certain." Another article reveals "evidence" that the long-awaited PowerBook G4 may surface today: a PowerBook G4 special deal is being advertised at Outpost.com. A simple typo, or a slip of the lip sure to incur the Wrath of Steve? (Since the PowerBook G4 ad links to PowerBook G3 listings, we're betting on the former.)

In any case, we'll know in mere hours whether or not the Go2Mac "Apple Laptop Release Date Prediction Curse" has worn off. We'd love to see new iBooks and PowerBooks today, not just because shiny new Apple gear always makes us feel all sunny inside, but also because we hate to see anyone strike out.

It's finally happened: we've witnessed the first casualty in the recent escalation of the Megahertz Wars. Faithful viewer Joey McNair was the first to note the battle damage sustained by Intel's recently-released 1.13 GHz Pentium III; according to a ZDNet article, the company is recalling every single one of the current reigning clock-speed-champions due to a bug an erratum. Anyone up for some long division?

Here's the deal: reportedly there's something wrong with those 1.13 GHz speed demons that shipped a month ago, which can cause freezes when the chip operates "within certain temperatures and certain code sequences (in applications)." Intel has announced that it's "not happy with the chip" and is therefore yanking it back; it'll rework the processor to fix the problem and the chip will be "back on the market in a couple of months." So much for taking the lead in the clock speed races; Intel's score drops back to 1 GHz, while according to a CNET article, AMD has just started shipping its 1.1 GHz Athlon. (Of course, we should probably wait and see if those get recalled in a month, too.)

By the way, for those of you stabbing frantically at the Contact button to insist the G4 was actually the first casualty of the Megahertz Wars, it wasn't; sure, it's been in a 500 MHz development coma for a year and thus free from the exhausting grasp of Moore's Law, but it's still breathing and at least it hasn't been recalled. Still fuming about the G4's anemic-looking clock speed? Well, frankly, so are we-- but we'd rather have the Mac community plugging happily away on dual 500 MHz G4s for another six months than have Apple recall every Power Mac G4/750 it ships. That doesn't mean we're going to cut the Motorola PowerPC folks any slack, because they're still way behind the curve when it comes to raw megahertz... but we'd like them to do things right instead of just quickly.