Dare we hold out hope for an honest-to-goshness courtroom throwdown after all? Just yesterday we noted that Apple (having settled a lawsuit against a 22-year-old student who leaked prerelease builds of Tiger on the 'net) was setting the stage for arranging a settlement in the Think Secret lawsuit, too, by commenting that "it is not our desire to send students to jail." Think Secret, as you no doubt recall, is run by a 19-year-old Harvard undergrad (also known as-- you guessed it-- A STUDENT) named Nick Ciarelli who is currently being sued by Apple for having posted what he allegedly knew to be misappropriated trade secrets about unannounced Apple products such as the Mac mini. Apple's comment about wanting students to roam free and unfettered across the majestic plains of academia sure sounded like a less-than-subtle invitation to get everyone eating bagels around a conference table and hashing out some sort of vaguely amicable resolution.

Or not. If the Boston Herald is anything to go by, it sounds like Nick's mouthpiece isn't exactly the settling type. "I don't know what there is to settle," says law-talkin' guy. (We may not be practicing lawyers, but the first thing that pops into our heads is, well, the lawsuit.) "He didn't steal, he didn't break into computers; Apple just wants to intimidate people and control the news." Well, no one who knows anything about Steve Jobs is likely to dispute that latter point, there, but if we were Nick, we might be a teensy bit concerned that our lawyer's comments to the press make him sound like he doesn't actually know what his client is accused of having done in the first place.

See, no one, as far as we know, has ever accused Nick of stealing anything or of virtual breaking and entering. But the law apparently makes it pretty clear that, unless you're blowing the whistle on some sort of illegal cover-up that harms the public interest, it's not okay to publish or otherwise distribute someone else's trade secrets, even if you're not the one who swiped them in the first place. And no, regardless of the zillion foaming-at-the-mouth opinion pieces you've no doubt encountered on the subject, this case isn't about "bloggers' rights vs. those of the traditional media" at all; the same standard applies to anyone, which is presumably why you don't see The New York Times publishing leaked product specs very often.

But what do we know? Like we said, we're not exactly qualified to render an expert opinion, here. All we can say is, given what little we know about the case, to us laypeople, the comments made by Nick's lawyer sound dangerously... well, off-topic, we suppose. The good news is, we're not Nick, so we don't have to worry our pretty little heads over it. In fact, we can revel in his lawyer's apparent complete unwillingness to settle, because that means we get to watch this case make fireworks in the courtroom instead of fizzling out at the negotiating table. It's just that if Nick's defense is going to be "he didn't steal, he didn't break into computers," we're a little concerned that Apple will have such a slam-dunk case that the whole thing will be over before the cameras start rolling. Pace yourselves, fellas! We need our dose of courtroom histrionics, you know.

So what do you figure, do computer security companies have full-time PR people whose entire job is to spew alarmist sound bites at the press and lend a little extra color to lurid tales of imminent viral doom? It would certainly make sense from a money perspective; after all, if you make a sizable chunk of your cash from sales of firewalls, virus scanners, etc., then hiring a Minister of FUD to collaborate with the press into scaring the pants off the computer-using public is just good business. That would certainly explain the recent hubbub with Symantec saying, "hey, Mac OS X users, you're going to face an onslaught of viruses and hacker attacks any day now (despite pretty much all evidence to the contrary) and oh, by the way, Norton Antivirus 9.0 for Macintosh is available right now for the low, low price of just $69.95!"

Okay, fine, maybe we're being a little more paranoid than is strictly necessary about this, but here it is just a couple of days later, and Symantec's right back in the news, this time casting aspersions at the iTunes Music Store. Faithful viewer David McConnell tipped us off to a Washington Post article in which a Symantec product manager is quoted as saying, "the bad guys are putting evil agents into music files and even videos that we are downloading. Music files especially. And you don't know it's there."

Dunt-dunt-dunt-DUNNNNNNNNN!!

The thing is, though, in this case, everything Symantec says may be a little melodramatic, but it's also 100 percent true; anything you download from a dodgy peer-to-peer service is a possible mule carrying viruses, adware, and spyware (although right now pretty much none of it will affect a Mac in the slightest). The problem is that Symantec's comments are used in context to imply that songs downloaded from Apple's iTMS are loaded up with Invisible Evil Stuff™ ready to violate your privacy. The Post article first states that "some music services... sneak in adware or, worse, viruses and spyware," and while the author is careful to point out that the riskiest services are the P2P networks hosting illegal song downloads, he does mention that "even reputable online music stores sometimes install adware" that tracks what web sites you visit and reports it back to Big Brother. Then, in the very next paragraph, while still on the topic of adware, he mentions that "music fans have downloaded more than 200 million songs from [Apple's] iTunes Music Store since its launch in 2003." What conclusion is Joe Reader expected to draw?

So we're not saying this is part of some nefarious new plot at Symantec to darken the public's perception of Apple's products and services. Heck, the company's comments aren't even new; the Arizona Republic had a slow news day and finally just got around to reprinting the Post article, which originally ran last December. And in this case, Symantec only provided a general statement, and it was entirely the Post that hints at adware hiding in Apple's song downloads. So we're left to wonder: was the article just sloppy writing, or was the implication that the iTMS is riddled with hidden adware intentional?

We've got just seven words for you: International Security-and-Media Apple Defamation Conspiracy. Was there ever any doubt?

Hey, wait-- what's this invisible file in our iTunes Music folder named ".SecretHiddenAdWare"? Must be some sort of preference file or something...

Just to wander slightly off-topic for a minute, is it okay to celebrate a big win for the PowerPC architecture even if it's not directly Mac-related? Because the supercomputer race just keeps getting hotter and hotter, and while the 12.25 teraflop performance of Virginia Tech's System X, the only Mac-based cluster in the top 400 (UCLA has a small Xserve cluster ranked at #444), recently slid from third to seventh place, the bestest of the best is the non-Mac-but-still-PowerPC-based BlueGene/L system developed by IBM, whose performance hit a mind-blistering 70.72 teraflops last November-- over 36 percent faster than the silver medal entrant, the Intel-based Columbia cluster at NASA. Good times.

And they're only getting better! If the very thought of anything existing in this plane of reality flexing over 70 teraflops of raw computational beefcake had you hyperventilating into a paper bag, you may want to call the ambulance before you hear this, just to save some time. Remember how, even when BlueGene/L captured the top spot by an insanely wide margin, it was actually still under construction? Well, according to BBC News, IBM's worker ants have been busy; they recently doubled the number of processors in that puppy-- and the thing now spits out 135.5 teraflops, which clearly qualifies as just plain obscene.

Like we said, it's nothing to do with the Mac-- not directly, at least. But given that BlueGene/L is so far ahead of the rest of the pack and it's got PowerPCs working its mojo (the Beeb is overstating things a bit when it says that "the chips are the same as those found in high-end computers on the High Street," since the PowerPC 440s in BlueGene/L aren't quite what you'd find in a Power Mac), some people are bound to sit up and take notice of the fact that "Intel Inside" isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be. Will it sell more Macs? Maybe not to the average shmoe on the street, but we can definitely see at least a few high-tech speed freaks getting interested in computers that just happen to be PowerPC-based, just like that BlueGene/L thing that spanked Intel's best so hard the welt's visible on the other side.

The sickest thing of all, of course, is that BlueGene/L still isn't complete. IBM's still busy glomming more and more processors onto that sucker, and reportedly when it's done, BlueGene/L will score somewhere in the neighborhood of-- ready for this?-- 360 teraflops, which will probably cause up to a third of the human population to keel over and die of utter disbelief when it finally happens, and anyone foolish enough to gaze upon the completed BlueGene/L while it does its thing will wind up with their faces melted off like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. But hey, isn't that a small price to pay to watch a few hundred thousand PowerPCs crank out over a third of a petaflop?