You know, we were actually expecting to take today off, what with it being a sacred religious holiday and all (have we mentioned that we're devout members of the Church of Legally-Extorted Free Candy?), but when we saw that even Apple was getting into the spirit of the season, we figured we'd at least crank out a token episode in honor of the day. After all, if Apple's going to expend the effort to scare its customers, then the least we can do is make sure people know about it.

So here it is, Apple's online equivalent of a warm holiday greeting: A special message for FireWire 800 disk drive users. And guess what that special message is? Appropriately enough, it's "Boo!" Yes, kiddies, Apple has officially acknowledged that while Panther is indeed a treat, there was a trick or two in that matte black box as well: "Apple has identified an issue with external FireWire hard drives using the Oxford 922 bridge chip-set with firmware version 1.02 that can result in the loss of data stored on the disk drive." Nothing says Halloween like ghosts, goblins, Steve Ballmer in a tutu, and the ghastly specter of irreversible data loss.

The good news is that apparently the problem isn't actually Apple's fault, since it "resides in the Oxford 922 chip-set." MacMinute notes that several drive manufacturers (including LaCie, Wiebetech, and Other World Computing) have already issued firmware patches to fix the problem. Interestingly, though, while claiming that the problem is Oxford's fault, Apple never explicitly acknowledges that the data loss "issue" at hand affects Panther and not Jaguar, but as far as we can tell, that's the case.

Even more interestingly, Macworld UK reports that Oxford Semiconductor (whose firmware is allegedly the lurking horror, here) attributes the data loss to "a change in the way Panther uses FireWire," but notes that "this problem was fixed" during Panther's development process and "now it's come back again." A Macworld source concurs that the data loss issue didn't occur in late development builds of Panther, but did affect builds prior to those released in early September. So even if Oxford is technically at fault, apparently Panther worked around the firmware issue-- at least, until the release version came out. What do you think-- maybe Apple put the data loss back in when legions of irate developers complained about its removal?

Meanwhile, just because you aren't using a fancy new FireWire 800 drive doesn't mean you can put away the paranoia. Oxford warns that "as there is currently no evidence that this issue is purely related to Oxford's 922-based drives, Oxford is advising all FireWire drive users to take advantage of further Panther revisions as they arrive." Mmmmm, maybe we'll hold off on Pantherizing our production system just a leetle while longer. Then again, who's to say that future Panther point releases won't restore more favorite bugs from earlier development builds? We hear there was quite an uproar from unhappy programmers when Apple removed the crowd-pleasing "screen goes blank and smoke pours from the optical drive" issue...

Bugs rising from the dead! Is this a great holiday or what?!