Good news, campers! Yesterday's call-out to the staff of Mac OS Rumors hasn't yet produced a response from anyone actually affiliated with the site (thus failing to dispel vague concerns that they may have been "silenced" by hired shadow warriors of the East), but faithful viewer Dan Farmer was the first of many to inform us that MOSR's technical problem is, indeed, with its DNS entries, and thus its server is at least still accessible at its raw IP address of 199.105.116.92. So if you were suffering MOSR withdrawal symptoms, this here's your methadone.

Better news still, despite the DNS snafu which has prevented most of the Mac community from visiting its site for about ten or eleven days now, the MOSR staff had updated the server's content as recently as a week ago-- so if they have been whacked, at least there's a couple of final reports available by which we can remember them. In particular, there's an intriguing resurrection of those carbon fiber PowerBook rumors that have been floating around on and off for a bunch o' months now: assuming the worst, MOSR's final contribution to the rumormongering community is a mention of a "virtually indestructible" PowerBook, building on earlier reports that hinted at a high-end portable with a G5 at its heart protected by a "largely carbon-fiber enclosure" made of "'thermoplastic' high-resin CF material."

The thing is, though, the carbon fiber PowerBook rumors were vociferously denied by Jason O'Grady of O'Grady's PowerPage, who insisted that such a beast was unlikely to claw its way out of Apple's labs because carbon fiber is a pretty expensive material; O'Grady estimates that a PowerBook made with the stuff would cost over five grand. Based on O'Grady's debunking, MOSR had "mostly let the specific issue of carbon fiber drop," stating that "when Jason O'Grady speaks, we tend to listen."

Which is all well and good, of course, but the thing is, O'Grady's debunking seems to be based entirely on price, and Apple has never shied away from offering some pretty pricey laptops in the past. In addition, O'Grady himself admits that Sony has a carbon fiber laptop that sells for $4,000; okay, sure, the thing is teensy-tiny, but at least it proves that a carbon fiber PowerBook isn't completely out of the question. Top that all off with the fact that O'Grady has had a bit of a spotty track record when it comes to Apple portable predictions occasionally in the past, and we're not entirely sure why MOSR puts so much stock in the "strength of Jason O'Grady's statements on the issue" when it admits that its own sources for the carbon fiber rumors have "strong track records."

Now, our sources, on the other hand, clearly suck. We asked them what the PowerBook G5 enclosure would be made of, and they said "love." What is that all about?

Anyway, the question of whether or not carbon fiber is the magic material is largely moot; as long as Apple can ship an "indestructible PowerBook," we won't care what it's made out of. Reportedly Apple wants it to have a "scratch-tolerant black appearance" (Yay! Back to black!) and be capable of surviving "most typical laptop-lifetime accidents involving a less than 20-foot drop." Yikes! If this all turns out to be true, we envision some really fun Stevenote demos involving sledgehammers and possibly some sort of vice. And heck, even if the IndestructoBook costs five large, we're sure there are people who'd pay that much for a portable they can chuck out of a second-story window whenever the mood strikes them. Heck, our own PowerBooks don't feel like they'd survive a twenty-foot drop onto a pile of goose feathers and magical fairy dust, so there's got to be a market, right?

Geez, is anyone else picking up on a pattern, here? First Napster announces that it's going to go live in the UK by the end of the summer, and then it springs a surprise launch on us all before spring is even over. And just earlier this month, the company announced that its service would become available in Canada "this summer"... so, um, given that it's not summer yet, guess what just happened?

No, it's got nothing to do with crabcakes. Geez, learn to take a hint.

That's right, as faithful viewer Mike Lush tells us and the San Francisco Chronicle confirms, Napster went Canadian yesterday, marking "the second time in a week the online music service has ventured outside the United States ahead of major competitors like Apple Computer Inc." Oooo, burn.

We have no idea what's up with Napster beating projected ship dates left and right, but clearly Apple needs to floor it if it wants to avoid choking on any more international dust. When Napster was first into the UK, we were able to rationalize the situation by reminding ourselves that while Napster went for a UK-only launch, Apple was holding out for Europe-wide licensing and a Europe-wide store, which was bound to take longer. But Canada? Unless there's been a series of secessions and the formation of a loose coalition of independent provinces that we never heard about, it sounds like this time Apple just got whipped, plain and simple.

Well, we don't know what's up with Apple in Canada, but let's trot back to Europe for a sec, since that's where Apple's even further behind, and lagging more and more by the day; faithful viewer Frank Davis tipped us off to a Reuters article reporting that Sony just signed deals with "independent record labels in the UK, France, and Germany," and it plans to launch Sony Connect in those countries on June 7th. Meanwhile, Apple is still only publicly committing to a Euro-iTMS launch by the "end of this year." Here's hoping the company pulls a major Napster and gets the store off the ground in Europe well in advance of its self-imposed end-of-year deadline, because otherwise, we believe the phrase is "wuh-oh."

The good news is that the odds of an imminent Euro-iTMS launch appear to be improving; as faithful viewer Bob Gulien notes, The Register is reporting that "Apple could be ready to launch its iTunes Music Store in Europe by the middle of June"-- which is just what previous rumors have stated, although The Reg claims to have a bit of reasoning behind the date. Apparently "sources said to be familiar with the company's plans" are insisting that Apple has finally scraped together the licenses it needs to get the Europe store up and running, and if that's true, then the mid-June launch date sounds pretty reasonable.

And that's when the real race will start. We've been hearing over and over again that the only reason Apple is selling so much more music than its competitors here in the U.S. is because it got a head start; well, let's see what the Europe numbers look like six months after Euro-iTMS opens. We suspect that Apple will still do quite well, despite the iTMS opening after Sony Connect, Napster, and all those OD2-based sites like MyCokeMusic.com. Heck, we'd even bet all our Star Wars action figures on the outcome. Well, except Boba Fett. No matter how sure we are, we never risk the Fett-man.

Speaking of Apple potentially blowing its wide-margin lead in the digital music field, the iTunes Music Store isn't the only thing under fire; let's not forget that everyone and his grandmother are trying to slap together the ultimate "iPod killer." Now, while it's true so far that no music service has come close to eclipsing the iTMS and every player hyped as an iPod killer has performed in the market more like an iPod killee, it's probably important to keep in mind that one big name still hasn't quite entered the fray. Sure, Microsoft has been pushing its Windows Media format to just about every non-Apple, non-Sony download service and every non-iPod player, but it hasn't actually launched its own service or hardware. Yet.

The day of reckoning is nigh, though, and the trash talk has started in earnest. Faithful viewer mrmgraphics forwarded us a Macworld UK article in which MSN corporate veep Yusuf Mehdi is quoted as claiming that once its music download service goes live later this year, the company will sell Microsoft-branded portable players that will-- ready for this?-- "look and feel as good as the iPod for as little as $50." Uhhhh... yeah. Well, maybe if it looks and feels as good without actually, you know, storing and playing music. In fact, now that we think about it, since the iPod is all about style, why hasn't Apple shipped the iPod Lite? Picture a $49 iPod sans battery, hard disk, and processor; looks and feels exactly as good as the original, and at just a fraction of the price!

Well, okay, technically Mehdi's quote might be taken slightly out of context; some of his expanded comments are available in a Microsoft blog at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and while the "look and feel as good as the iPod" quote is repeated, he's actually talking about third-party, non-Microsoft players that support WMA and will therefore work with Microsoft's music store-- which is, in other words, exactly what we have today, only without Microsoft having added still another WMA-based download service to the mix. And sure, it's certainly possible to sell something that "looks and feels" as good as an iPod for fifty smackers, but not with anything even close to the iPod's level of functionality or ease of use. So, frankly, we're finding it a little tough to get worried.

In fact, if we have to work up a specific anxiety about Microsoft's upcoming foray into iTMS territory, it's that the company has pockets so deep it could hype the living bejeezus out of a few of those alleged "good as an iPod" players and gain a bunch of ground on the iPod through sheer brute-force advertising alone. But with the fourth-generation iPod supposedly just around the corner, there's every chance that Apple still has a killer new feature or six up its sleeve, and we tend to think that the iPod is so iconic in pop culture by now that it's just not going anywhere for a good while yet.

Then again, we were also shocked and appalled when Dude, Where's My Car? didn't get dual Best Actor nominations, so maybe you shouldn't listen to us. In fact, we're pretty sure of it.