Apple's latest horror story just keeps getting scarier. Yesterday we horrified you all with chilling tales of how the four "special" keys on Apple's new Pro Keyboard hide a terrifying secret. An unsuspecting customer plugs that shiny new translucent slab into a two-month-old Mac, pops in an audio CD, presses the "Volume Up" key, and... nothing happens. A little creeped out, she then tries the "volume down" and "mute" keys, but the music emanating from the speakers of her Strawberry iMac DV stays exactly the same volume. Fighting the urge to scream, she races for the phone to call the police, but the lines have been cut. Slowly, she edges back to the keyboard... the music continues its eerie non-volume-changing pace... holding her breath, she presses the "media eject" key... and the CD keeps right on playing! AIIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!!! Pretty scary, huh, kids?

But if you thought that was frightening, just wait until you check out the sequel. You probably recall that U.S. Apple Store customers who had pre-ordered the Pro Keyboard received email notification of the "dead key" bug, and were given the choice of cancelling their orders, or buying the keyboard anyway and waiting for a software patch "early next year." Early next year? Doesn't that sound a little... well, slack to you? Surely Apple could hack together a fix in far less than four months. Does it seem like Apple's actively trying to persuade customers to cancel their orders? Don't answer yet-- consider the default action that Apple takes if that email is ignored: if the customer doesn't respond in thirty days, the order is cancelled automatically. Strange, n'est-ce pas?

If you think that's odd, consider the plight of those international Apple Store customers who are waiting for their new Pro Keyboards; most of them appear to have had their orders cancelled whether they liked it or not. According to MacNN, a customer reports that Apple cancelled his order for a Pro Keyboard without even telling him; when he asked why, the email he got back simply stated that "the keyboard is not available. The four new keys only work with the new Macs." Even stranger, a reader at MacInTouch received email from Apple Japan stating that his Pro Keyboard order was also cancelled-- but instead of blaming the four "dead keys," Apple Japan's rationale for the abrupt order cancellation was that the item had "slipped from a September ship date to early 2001."

Sounds like there's more to this problem than four dead keys. We always thought it was a little strange that Apple was making such a big deal about a handful of nonessential volume control and disk eject keys not working on older systems. (Maybe we're just eternal pessimists, but we never even expected the new keys to work on older systems.) Now we can't help wondering whether that was just a convenient excuse to cover massive production delays-- especially since Apple's four-month estimate for a software patch coincides nicely with Apple Japan's reported four-month shipping delay. Perhaps Apple Japan never got the memo about the "official" excuse to use when cancelling the orders?

Is it just us, or does one of the most popular words bouncing around Apple's hallways these days seem to be "oops"? The mistakes generally seem to be relatively minor things, like info about the ATI Radeon being posted to the UK Apple Store, or this whole "Pro Keyboards don't work fully on older systems" fracas, but we're starting to get the feeling that something's lacking in Apple's day-to-day routine-- be it communication, or discipline, or maybe enough caffeine to keep the guys in the trenches bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Web site slip-ups, in particular, seem to be all the rage these days.

Take, for example, the latest "oops" to issue forth from the folks running Apple's Tech Info Library. While we were too late to see it ourselves, faithful viewer James Ferguson tells us that the web lackeys accidentally posted an article explaining exactly how to bypass Mac OS 9's Multiple Users feature in the event that the administrator password gets lost. Visiting the URL now just produces a "Lotus Notes Exception - Entry not found in index" error, but we're told that even when it was publicly accessible, it was clearly labeled as meant for internal use only.

Even though that data was only made public for a short time, we have to assume that it's since been echoed in various places on the Web, just waiting for "interested parties" to dig it up. Which means that if you're relying on Multiple Users to prevent unauthorized access to your files, you should probably think about switching to Plan B. Then again, if you're paranoid enough to be worried about Apple's temporary leak of "How To Crack Multiple Users," you're probably also paranoid enough to be employing any number of other personal data security methods currently available-- in which case the point is moot anyway.

After this latest little web indiscretion, though, we wish we had the time and resources to hammer away at Apple's site twenty-four hours a day; we get the feeling that any number of interesting bits of information accidentally get posted, albeit temporarily, when they're supposed to be tucked safely behind the Silicon Curtain. Forget about Worker Bee posting trade secrets to a GeoCities account... the real dirt's all kicking around somewhere on apple.com. You just have to know where (and when) to look...

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, The Evil Empire reigned supreme-- though it faced resistance from a scrappy band of rebels known as the Justice Department. (And that just goes to show how scary Microsoft had become-- we're perfectly comfortable casting the U.S. government as the underdogs in this scenario.) Many of you were fans of "Redmond Justice," the white-knuckle courtroom drama that had us all on the edges of our seats for lo these many years. However, ever since the rebels won a decisive victory and sent Darth Gates off to ponder his appeal, things have been pretty slow. Right now we're all sitting around waiting to hear whether the Supreme Court will deign to hear the appeal directly, or if it'll punt the case back to a lower court first. In other words, we're in downtime.

Luckily, there are plenty of smaller battles being fought against Microsoft's white-armored lawyers, and one of those cases recently bore some dramatic fruit. Does anyone remember the Bristol case? We only mentioned it once before, over a year ago; at the time, the case was just finishing up. The people at Bristol Technologies made software that allowed people to run Windows applications on UNIX systems. They licensed the Windows source code from Microsoft in order to build and maintain their product, but alleged that once Microsoft released its UNIX-competing Windows NT operating system, it denied the Bristol folks access to the NT source code in an attempt to kill Bristol's product and encourage customers to migrate from UNIX to NT. Well, as it turned out, Bristol pretty much lost-- the jury found Microsoft innocent of almost all charges, and only awarded Bristol one dollar instead of the $263 million it had been seeking.

We thought that was the end of that, but faithful viewer Justin alerted us to a new development in the Bristol case; according to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft has just been ordered by a federal judge to cough up a million bucks for "wanton" and "reckless" business practices against the Bristol folks. It seems that the $1 awarded by the jury last year was for compensatory damages; the million-dollar smackdown just issued by Judge Hall represents punitive damages against Microsoft for violating Connecticut's unfair-trade practices act. Microsoft now holds the dubious distinction of having received the highest penalty ever for violating that law.

Of course, $1 million to Microsoft is like a parking ticket to the rest of us, but given that the Redmond Empire currently awaits a decision on whether the government will blast its Death Star in two, this may be a bad omen. And while that massive blow is still pending the resolution of the appeal, Microsoft is still the target of several other Bristol-sized antitrust suits-- in fact, Bristol itself is reportedly considering a new trial in light of Judge Hall's stern decision. So Microsoft may find itself dying the Death of a Thousand Cuts if the trend continues. Stay tuned.