Ah, here we go! Remember last week when we bemoaned the dearth of juicy pre-Expo rumors with nary a month to go before the big show? Well, now it looks like things are finally starting to kick into high gear. Of course, we had to import some foreign-made gossip from Taiwan in order to get the ball rolling, but hey, sometimes you just can't buy American, you know?

Behold the vessel of our rumorological salvation: DigiTimes cites "sources in Taiwan's IT industry" as it reports that Apple plans to ship a "next-generation 'New iMac'" no later than March and more likely in "January or February," making it a shoo-in for guest-star status during next month's Stevenote. DigiTimes claims that the new machine will have a "magnesium-alloy case and a high proportion of plastic parts for cost reduction." Gee, sounds sexy. Especially when you realize that DigiTimes probably isn't referring to any gee-whiz neato-keen magnesium enclosure, per se, but rather to the skeleton of the system living beneath the "high proportion of plastic parts." Then again, the publication notes that the current iMac "uses a stainless steel and zinc alloy," which sounds suspiciously like the articulated arm on which the display perches, so maybe that's what's at issue. It's really not clear.

Seriously, even though the article is in English, the language barrier can be fierce. The article also notes that "in September [Apple] suspended a plan to integrate a Tablet PC and DeskNote into a new line of products, dubbed the 'New New iMac,' due to cost considerations. The company has now decided to adopt less expensive materials to manufacture the new generation of the New iMac to attain a more competitive cost." Wow. If you could somehow fashion it into a hat, that text is practically opaque enough to shield you from spaceborne gamma radiation. Needless to say, the wording is at least mildly ambiguous, and so MacRumors apparently interprets it as saying that the tablet device is still on hold while the magnesium-alloy iMac is a separate imminent product, whereas The Register takes it to mean that the tablet thingy was on hold in September, but is now moving forward and is the "New New iMac," also referred to as the "next-generation 'New iMac'" and the "new generation of the New iMac."

It's clear as day, provided by "day" you mean "night during a blizzard to a man with toothpaste in both eyes who also happens to be suspended in mud." Personally, we lean more towards The Reg's reading, i.e. that what DigiTimes is trying to say is that Apple has a brand new iMac with a removable screen that can function as a tablet device, and that it was supposed to have shipped in September but didn't for cost reasons, and now Apple has reworked its design with a bunch of cheap material and so it's going to ship in January or February. Whether or not DigiTimes is right or not is a whole separate matter; we're too busy untangling inscrutable syntax to worry about accuracy at this point.

However, if you're the kind of spoilsport who actually cares about anything as mundane as reliability in these matters, we should note that MacRumors lists plenty of examples of DigiTimes having been gloriously wrong in the past. And incidentally, Robert X. Cringely's source for his recent speculation about Mac tablets arriving as early as January was also the "Taipei press," so as far as we can tell, literally all of this buzz about an Apple-branded tablet device has been imported from Taiwan. That doesn't mean it's wrong, of course; plenty of Apple stuff is made there, so you have to figure that at least some of these Taiwanese "sources" actually know what's rolling off the assembly lines, and we personally find the idea of an iMac with a wireless removable tablet-style display a whole lot more viable as an Apple product than a "Me Too" Mac version of the Tablet PCs that are selling so poorly you'd think they were dipped in something unpleasant.

Whatever comes to pass, we suppose we'll find out in a month. Ooooh, see? This is the kind of anticipation we wanted! Thrills! Chills! Incomprehensible hints of questionable veracity from an industrious island nation! Our cup runneth over...

If you've ever been to an Apple retail store, you know just what an oasis it can be: a bubble of retail calm where you, as a Mac user, can feel perfectly at ease. You're among friends. You can walk up to total strangers and start talking, because there's a decent chance that they're Mac nerds just like you are-- and even if they're not, at the very least you probably won't get Maced. Anyone who's been spit on by fascistic Best Buy staff for daring to wear a "Think different" t-shirt within the confines of that baffling warehouse of cut-rate consumer electronics can really appreciate the spa-like experience of hanging out at an Apple store and purging retail toxins with a healthy dose of Macitude. C'mon, the places even have their own bathrooms, for Pete's sake-- tell us that's not classy.

Believe us, then, when we tell you that we're loath to do anything that might disturb that sense of retail sanctuary you feel whenever you enter one of Apple's stores, but something has come to our attention that has our paranoia meters pegged at 11, and it would be grossly negligent of us not to report it here. (Not that we have a problem with gross negligence in and of itself, mind you, but we really can't afford another insurance rate hike.) Faithful viewer N Gray passed along a Wired article about that guy from Berkeley, California who flew all the way to Japan just to be first in line for the Apple Store Ginza's grand opening, and it's a good read about a Mac fan one or two twists more warped than the rest of us fanatics. The thing is, it also reveals something about the Apple retail stores that set our teeth on edge: apparently Big Brother Is Watching You.

Reportedly Apple's retail locations use something called "ShopperTrak" to "count the number of customers who enter the store, and to document their behavior once inside"; ShopperTrak is a "sophisticated video-monitoring system" which invisibly counts "the number of people passing the store, the percentage who enter, and the percentage of those who make a purchase." So now you know how Apple can periodically release those figures about the number of visitors to its stores and how many actually bought something. (There's no word, however, on how Apple knows that half of the customers who buy Macs in its stores are Wintel switchers, but we assume that the ShopperTrak system simply assumes that anyone with a haunted and beaten look in his eyes is crossing over from the Windows world.)

So there you have it: every single time you've been in an Apple store-- or, apparently, even passed by one-- you've been watched and "documented." Okay, so maybe it's Big Steve instead of Big Brother, and perhaps the covert collection of sales and customer traffic data doesn't quite rank as far up there on the moral outrage scale as 24-hour surveillance by an ironfisted totalitarian government with a penchant for sticking rats on your face, but it still makes us uneasy. Sure, we're all taped by security cameras in pretty much every store we visit these days, but nobody actually sees those tapes unless something happens (or the staff needs something to laugh at when they get drunk after hours). With ShopperTrak, though, you haven't just been mindlessly taped-- you've been watched and analyzed by some sort of HAL 9000-type computer that you just know is recording your strengths and weaknesses for that day when the machines finally make their move and take over.

Will that keep us from visiting the stores? Heck no, but we might keep ducking behind counters a lot and twitching uncontrollably. The good news is we pretty much do that already, so fundamentally nothing much has changed. If you see the camera, though, smile and wave; we bet that automated sales tracking systems get bored pretty easily.

'Tis the season for holiday miracles, yessirree, and we think we may have spotted the very first one of the year! Well, okay, technically we didn't spot it; it was faithful viewer Dan Green who forwarded us the CNET article. And come to think of it, whoever wrote the CNET article must have spotted it before him, and any of the various sources quoted in the article presumably knew before us, too. But trust us: we're right up near the top of that list-- the list of people who noticed that Microsoft has zero security patches to issue this month! If that doesn't qualify as a bona fide miracle, nothing does. Seriously, zero security patches from Microsoft? In a whole month? It makes the virgin birth look like that "look, my thumb came off" trick you use to freak out your two-year-old nephew.

Oh, wait-- we just noticed that while there are, indeed, zero security patches this month, there's a decidedly greater-than-zero number of recently-discovered holes to plug. In other words, the holes are there (such as "seven Internet Explorer flaws found in late November"), and Microsoft just hasn't gotten around to fixing them yet. Quoth Microsoft's security program manager: "It is not that we are not doing anything, it's just that we don't have a patch ready in the pipeline." Translation: "We're not doing anything."

Now that we look at it, that's not much of a miracle at all. Heck, if anything, Microsoft not patching flaws is probably more in character, not less. Guess we should have read further than the headline.

Of course, now the fact that the Department of Homeland Security flunked a security check by a congressional oversight committee makes all that much more sense. Faithful viewer eric tipped us off to a Washington Post story which reports that the DHS, which is "the government's lead agency on matters of Internet security"-- topped the list of seven federal agencies who scored an "F" in the subject of network security. Kinda makes you feel all warm and sunny inside, doesn't it? And not at all like barricading yourself in your house with a few dozen guns and a stockpile of anthrax medication.

The DHS head's response was weak, weak, weak: "If the evaluation is accurate, then there's no sense in whining whether or not it's reasonable to expect us to be secure already... if we're insecure, we need to be honest and candid with ourselves and we need to take a stance that we'll do what it takes to put the government's house in order." Do what it takes? So, what, does that mean the DHS will break its dramatically ill-conceived $90 million contract with Microsoft and get that flaw-ridden junk off of the department's 140,000 computers? Because, you know, that would be a holiday miracle we could print on a freakin' t-shirt.